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Stake pool tuning

More tuning work over the last few days. You may have noticed we plan to spin up some more pools later in March as ADV and ADV2 are nearing saturation.

The new pools will be the same class leading performance, and the same very low fees for you.

We want to make sure it stays that way so we’ve been looking into the performance metrics to ensure that the pools are well connected through the most performant relay nodes, to the best peers globally.

We’ve also tuned the available Intel cores, and memory allocation. We are now running at least 6 cores committed per relay node and BPN, with at least 20GB RAM available per node. All nodes have access to M.2 EVO970plus SSDs which have very high read and write speeds.

All clusters of nodes have the same performance characteristics, and this allows us to fail over seamlessly with no downtime for upgrades and security patching.

We use XFS as the file system as we find this gives some small gains over EXT4, and use Chrony for time sync linked to Stratum 1* time sources.

We will continue to monitor performance closely and will continue to upgrade the underlying bare metal as needed, especially as we move into the smart contract era in a few months.

* NTP implements a hierarchical system of time references. At the highest level, hardware reference clocks are referred to as stratum 0. A stratum 1 NTP server has a direct connection to a hardware (Stratum 0) clock and is a primary network time server.