Introduction

As Tezos core developers, we DaiLambda and Tarides are working together to improve the perfomance of Tezos context: the version controlled store of Tezos block chain states.

DaiLambda has Plebeia, an append-only style data storage system based on Merkle Patricia binary tree. It is similar to Irmin by Tarides used for the Tezos context but incompatible. DaiLambda and Tarides have worked together to improve the performance of Tezos context subsystem, sometimes using what we have learned from Plebeia. For example, we provided the context tree for faster file access from the middle of the directory tree. Our context flattening done at Hangzhou upgrade speeded up the node by 30%. Recently, we have worked together to provide efficient Merkle proof encoding of Tezos context, using the idea of extender nodes of Plebeia, which will be used for the layer 2 solutions introduced in Tezos Jakarta upgrade.

Abstract

We are developing a technique of gradual migration to perform huge context modification at a protocol upgrade in multiple blocks to reduce the migration downtime ultimately to an unnoticeable level.

As the first example of this gradual migration, we plan to remove garbage files spendable left in 283K contract directories in Tezos mainnet. They should have been removed at the Babylone upgrade but some were left untouched until today.