All Core Devs - Testing (ACDT) #40 | June 16 2025

Protocol Calls & happenings
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Meeting Summary:

The team discussed updates on Berlin interop, including gas limit scaling and Fusaka development, as well as performance issues related to client mechanisms and database operations. They addressed a buffer overflow issue in Geth and proposed a solution involving double buffering to flush inactive buffers asynchronously. The team also reviewed progress on history expiry, including client implementations for running without pre-merge history, and discussed plans for modifying error files and Portal features to better serve execution clients.

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The team discussed updates on Berlin interop, focusing on gas limit scaling and Fusaka development. They agreed to raise the gas limit to 45 million, pending client team fixes and releases. Marcin reported positive benchmarking results for 60 million gas limit, though further testing is needed. The team also addressed log management and large tree depths issues, with Ben suggesting performance benchmarks to inform future decisions. Jochem provided an update on extend contracts, explaining the creation of small proxy contracts and their impact on transaction performance.

Jochem discussed performance issues related to a client mechanism and database operations, particularly concerning execution times and bottlenecks. He noted that the system was slow for certain clients and mentioned that the problem might be related to the database. Jochem also mentioned that adding extra locations could help improve performance, and he observed that the system was competitive in terms of transactions.

The team discussed a buffer overflow issue in Geth that was causing 2.5 seconds of block processing time due to synchronous disk flushing. They identified that the problem occurred when blocks exceeded 256 megabytes, leading to a proposed solution of implementing double buffering to flush inactive buffers asynchronously. The team agreed to test this solution on the Shadow Fork and perfnet environments, with further discussion planned for Thursday’s meeting.

The team discussed the progress on history expiry, with Matt reporting that clients have implemented necessary features to run without pre-merge history, and clients are now free to make it the default mode. They plan to publish a blog post on the Ethereum Foundation blog in the next two weeks to share how to run clients without pre-merge history. The team also discussed modifying error files for post-merge and agreed to have separate error files for each layer, with Yasik working on the consensus layer. They aim to settle on the specification for historical data access in the next 1.5 months, which will allow clients to start pruning more history. Additionally, they plan to modify Portal features to better serve execution clients and will have a public community call to discuss these changes.

Next Steps:

  • Client teams to push performance fixes and make releases to support raising the gas limit to 45 million over the next week.
  • EF team to share more information on benchmarks and bottlenecks found during gas limit testing over the next week.
  • Marcin and team to continue crafting test cases for ECC pairing and ECC mul to determine if repricing is needed in Fusaka.
  • EF team to publish an EIP for ECC add repricing later this week.
  • PK to share reproducible test for log-related issues with client teams.
  • Client teams to run benchmarks on blocks full of logs to inform decision on log repricing or increasing peer-to-peer limits.
  • Jochem to continue working on reproducing and analyzing the issue with Estor and large tree depths.
  • Client teams to implement and test fixes for buffer flushing issues related to large blocks.
  • EF team to publish a blog post in the next couple of weeks about running clients without pre-merge history.
  • Client teams to begin making running without pre-merge history the default mode in their releases.
  • Yasik and team to finalize specification for consensus layer era file (era C) in the next 1.5 months.
  • EF team to organize a public community call about Portal Network changes later this week or early next week.

Recording Access: