Ethereum developers have released a software update to fix block completion issues that used to cause problems in the network’s beacon chain. The Prysm and Teku clients, two of the most commonly used clients on Ethereum, already have patches to fix the bug.
In a post, the developer called superphiz.eth divided On Twitter, the Ethereum Foundation claimed this This “extraordinary scenario” could have been caused by high utilization of some consensus layer clients, also called beacon chain. However, they assured that they are still investigating the incident that prevented the completion of blocks in epochs 3 and 8 twice: on Thursday 11 May and on Friday 12 May.
Likewise, the organization, which brings together key Ethereum developers, stressed that the network “continued to function as planned and users could continue to transact on it.” In this sense, Decentralization in the consensus layer of the network was important because not all clients were affectedstand out.
As can be seen on the website clientdiversity.orgthe most widespread client in Ethereum’s consensus layer, Lighthouse, had no problems. The second and third with more nodes they ran on did, Prysm and Teku, as reported by CriptoNoticias prior to the first of the two delay periods. One lasted 25 minutes and the other almost an hour.
The explanation of the Prysm developers
inside News When releasing its latest update, the Prysm team claimed that the new version “includes an optimization to prevent the Beacon Chain from consuming lots of resources during turbulent times.” “Upgrading is highly recommended if your node is going to be heavily used ‘ they added.
On the other hand, Prysm developer Terence Tsao wrote a thread in which he gives details of the events of May 11 and 12.
“Prysm nodes received many confirmations for previous epochs where the block did not reflect the final checkpoint in the fork election. The connected nodes probably sent the acknowledgment without having all the blocks for the rest of the epoch, causing Prysm to expend a lot of resources replaying the state and eventually going into a death spiral (CPU/OOM spikes) .”
Most customers have had similar issues, with the exception of Lighthouse, Tsao says. According to the Ethereum Foundation, such failures only occurred with Prysm and Teku.
The Prysm team also admitted a “subtle flaw” in their knots., where the correct state was not used to calculate the mixing during the time of the “death spiral”. As a solution to this problem, they promised a new update for the next week that will fix these shortcomings.
Clients and Block Completion on Ethereum
The completion of blocks in a network using Proof of Stake (PoS). refers to the process by which a block of transactions is considered validated and confirmed through the net. This will finally add it to the billing in the blockchain.
To complete a block on a PoS network, validators must participate in a consensus process. If the majority agrees that the transactions are valid, the block is considered complete and is permanently added to the blockchain.
Validator nodes use clients to interact with the rest of the network. and thus be able to fulfill their role in this process. Clients are therefore software applications that connect a node to Ethereum and allow users to send and receive transactions and participate in the block validation process.