Apr 18, 2025

I believe that the main reason I originally reduced the mini window to 5k was that it significantly improved the costly confirmation query due to improved data locality. However this query has been almost entirely eliminated. The larger window improves concurrency by reducing the gaps in the sawtooth pattern by 50/5 or 10x. That's significantly more time spent validating vs. waiting on blocks. The fastest runs are with an unlimited window, which in theory eliminates download gaps altogether. However when validating this can lead to arbitrarily long delays when waiting or an early block. 50k is therefore a good compromise when validating, otherwise unlimited. And it now looks like we no longer need to worry about varying the download window based on RAM/SSD size/speed.