Mar 23, 2023

So now that basic headers and blocks sync and storage is verified live, and tools are in good shape, I'll soon be moving on to the header chaser and block chaser. The header chaser maintains the pre-candidate header tree, validating and committing headers as they create a strongest and recent branch. The block chaser manages the parallel block download window and peer speed. But first I'm going to spend a day on optimizing block.tx hash computations from the wire serialization. Most of that work was already done, and it's been applied to headers and block.header, just not block.tx. This should significantly reduce deserialization/storage time, which will be easy to measure now against this baseline run.