Upkeep in the Tari gardens

This week's update is a small one - the community has been working on a plethora of issues and bugs that have been building up across the various projects to improve overall stability. Sometimes keeping a Zen garden entails designing new patterns, and sometimes it's about raking a lot of sand.

Universe

P2Pool

P2Pool has seen the most attention over the past two weeks. This is a critical component of Tari, but it remains a challenging feature to implement - the network interactions have proven a difficult beast to tame: in particular ensuring the various groups of peers aren't ending up on islands: able to view themselves across the waves but unable to sync their activities effectively.

Evidence from Universe telemetry indicates channel capacity errors from excessive network traffic, likely due to the message load. In addition, we’ve also determined that a 10-second block interval for P2Pool was likely too optimistic for ideal node synchronization, so we’ll be testing 30-second intervals going forward.

These are complications you pick up once in actual implementation, with telemetry from Universe playing a key role in narrowing down root causes. To those sharing your data with us, thank you.

Some of the many recent fixes and updates to P2Pool:

• Corrected an issue with the chain verification process that resulted in a panic
• Ensure disconnection from peers on older versions after a peer exchange
• Avoid requesting blocks from peers that are at a lower height than the requester
• Added pinned Tokio intervals for multiple required asynchronous checks
• Adjusted the minimum SHA3X difficulty
• Corrected an issue regarding target difficulty being adjusted outside of a block before the block is committed, which has implications for the integrity of mined blocks.

Minotari

Mintotari saw another release candidate go out with new features and improvements listed below:

• A new service will periodically get checkpoints from a DNS server and validate against their state, removing the risk of miners avoiding orphan chain mining.
• Fixed an issue specific to MacOS and Linux that would cause the base node to enter an unresponsive state if you pressed Ctrl+C multiple times, the command line interface (CLI) would enter an undefined state that prevented further interaction.
• Reduced error log spam that occurred when on an unsupported network.
• Added wallet connectivity timeout so long dial-peer failures can be managed timeously.
• Changed Tari Pulse - Minotari's checkpoint monitoring service - to run at fixed intervals.

Aurora Wallet

Contributors released a new version of Aurora wallet a couple of days ago, incorporating updates and fixes discussed in our previous update and some additional items. You can download the latest versions on the Apple App Store and Google Play store.