Consensus-layer Call 117

[djrtwo]

Consensus-layer Call 117 Agenda

prev: call 116

Meeting Date/Time: Thursday 2023/9/7 at 14:00 UTC
Meeting Duration: 1.5 hours

youtube stream

1. Deneb
   • Devnets
   • CL p2p testing review
   • 4844 mainnet parametrization
     • Codex presentation on big mainnet blocks & Q&A
     • Other inputs (e.g. devnet performance at 3/6)
     • Attempt to form consensus mainnet parameters
2. Research, spec, etc
   • StableContainer proposal
   • upper churn limit
3. Open Discussion/Closing Remarks

[leobago]

Big Blocks Study

During May 28th and June 11th, there was an experiment performed to inject large blocks on Mainnet and study their propagation. Multiple "sentry" nodes were deployed before the injection, in 3 locations around the world, to study the latency in different geographies. We studied the block diffusion latency for different block sizes, as well as the attestation latency.

Later on we discovered that there are many organic big blocks on mainnet, some of them going over 2MB (https://etherscan.io/block/17968783). Over the last 6 months we have observed 100K+ blocks of size over 250KB, while the average block size is 100KB.

Resources

Big Block Experiment
Blocksize vs. Latency analysis
Attestation latency analysis
Block diffusion latency for a period of time (last 24H by default)

Organic Big Blocks
5000+ large (500KB+) blocks
100,000+ large (250KB+) blocks

[etan-status]

Looking for reviews on the SSZ StableContainer (formerly PartialContainer) proposal: EIP-7495

One idea is to start using that for transactions / receipts in EIP-6493, but the StableContainer could also become useful in context of EIP-4788 as it provides stable generalized indices across spec forks. For example, if we add fields to a consensus object in the future and bump it, e.g., from 16 to 17 fields, as of now, all existing proof verifiers targeting that consensus object will stop working without an update.

Also, regarding timing, if EIP-7495 receives positive reviews, could we bump Verge specs from current EIP-6475 style SSZ Optional to the proposed EIP-7495 style StableContainer as well? For that, we'd need StableContainer implementations in SSZ libraries, it's rather straightforward though (sample impl provided in the EIP).

• TheVerge: spec draft consensus-specs#3230

[dapplion]

• Late minute addition, would like to discuss Add max epoch churn limit (EIP-7514) consensus-specs#3448