This issue is an aggregate of dangling issues here and there about UTxO-HD, to better reflect the current status of the feature, with updated information.
Current status
The UTxO-HD feature is targeted to be released in node 10.4.
High level description of UTxO-HD and features
UTxO-HD reworks the consensus codebase to decouple the LedgerState from the UTxO set, such that the latter can be stored on the disk therefore lowering the memory consumption of the node. It has two modes of operation: in-memory and on-disk, which use the same API so should be indistinguishable from the node's point of view.
The in-memory mode should work in a very similar way to the current node, with similar performance metrics. The on-disk mode will considerably lower the memory usage of the node at the cost of some performance. This is a tradeoff users will have to consider.
Using the on-disk mode, even a node running on a Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB of RAM) was able to follow the chain.
Currently on-disk uses LMDB underneath. In the long run, the LSM-tree library is being developed to provide a more performant on-disk backend.
In terms of functionality, a UTxO-HD node does not have more functionalities than a normal node.
You can try the feature already by building cardano-node from the utxo-hd-10.4 branch. It should work both with cabal and with nix.
This issue is an aggregate of dangling issues here and there about UTxO-HD, to better reflect the current status of the feature, with updated information.
Current status
The UTxO-HD feature is targeted to be released in node 10.4.
CPU > 85% slotsis drastically increased. Seems like this is an artifact of the analysis. The performance team will look into this.High level description of UTxO-HD and features
UTxO-HD reworks the consensus codebase to decouple the LedgerState from the UTxO set, such that the latter can be stored on the disk therefore lowering the memory consumption of the node. It has two modes of operation: in-memory and on-disk, which use the same API so should be indistinguishable from the node's point of view.
The in-memory mode should work in a very similar way to the current node, with similar performance metrics. The on-disk mode will considerably lower the memory usage of the node at the cost of some performance. This is a tradeoff users will have to consider.
Using the on-disk mode, even a node running on a Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB of RAM) was able to follow the chain.
Currently on-disk uses LMDB underneath. In the long run, the LSM-tree library is being developed to provide a more performant on-disk backend.
In terms of functionality, a UTxO-HD node does not have more functionalities than a normal node.
You can try the feature already by building
cardano-nodefrom theutxo-hd-10.4branch. It should work both withcabaland withnix.