Harmony RPC Network Update 1/10

Statement Of Current Problem

The team has picked up on issues from both the DeFi Kingdoms and VenomDAO communities. The issues pertaining timing out of RPCs on attempts to call it attempts to call an RPC times out. The symptom DFK players observe includes a pop-up browser error stating “wait(n=1) would exceed context deadline”. VenomDAO is noticing the same error as well.

Fixing This Particular Issue

The problem appears to be related rate limits that are too aggressive, causing some apps to exhaust their retry attempts to call an RPC.

The team has a possible solution which will be deployed within the next 24 hours:

https://github.com/harmony-one/harmony/pull/3977

Other Network and RPC Optimizations

The team has been hard at work to develop an update to the network to help optimize the RPCs. Harmony Mainnet v4.3.2 is coming this week and the team be performing the upgrade of the network at the same time.

Tomorrow (Tuesday 11 Jan) during the Asia day time, Shard 2 and 3 will be upgraded, the next day if no issue shard 0 and 1 will follow.

Following these upgrades, users should experience improvements in overall usage of the network.

Sync-status and sync speed improvement related PRs:

  • Additional fix for node-sync status
  • Release one rlock and change default value at getMaxPeerHeight
  • Rate-limits on multiples RPC : PendingTransactions, Call, and GetDelegationsByValidator
  • Added metrics for dns server for sync service
  • Extend the expiration for sync status cache for non-validator nodes
  • Remove two unnecessary use of global mutex in StateSync
  • Rate-limits on multiples RPC : StakingNetworkInfo, SuperCommittees, CurrentUtilityMetrics
  • Refactor and make sync status check interval smaller

Other updates :

  • replace go-ethereum/ethereum/rpc with harmony-one/harmony/eth/rpc
  • Add revert mechanism for UpdateValidatorWrapper – this will be used in future PR to enable staking transaction with metamask
  • fix DecodeSigBitmap
  • Do not process txns if node is out of sync to help with a faster sync
  • fix block decode bug resulting to node panicking, issue #3955
  • new RPC : GetHeaderByNumberRLPHex and GetProof

More details regarding the network update found here:
https://talk.harmony.one/t/v4-3-2-release-update/9044

Harmony RPC Network Update 1/10