Blurt Nodes and Communities Update

Hi, folks!

Here is a quick update from the core team regarding Blurt and its infrastructure.

We go into some rather technical issues, but we will try to write it in a way that is easy to understand by those who aren't technically inclined, while not being too boring for those who are familiar with the subject matter.

Recent Outages

As most of you have probably noticed, there have been some performance issues and outages with some of the Blurt websites in the past few days.

The core team is aware of the issues and is working on solutions.

The main issue that has caused several outages during the past few days has to do with some of the RPC nodes crashing.

RPC nodes are what enable Blurt frontends like blurt.blog and blurtwallet.com to get information about the Blurt blockchain. They are the bridge between the blockchain and the user interfaces.

The issue has to do with the way frontends call the RPC. Some of the calls are very resource intensive for the RPC, ie. the RPC has to do a lot of work in order to gather the info and respond to the front end with the data it needs. When one of the RPC nodes gets flooded with these types of calls, it gets overwhelmed, and that sometimes causes it to crash.

The maintainer of the official Blurt infrastructure (@saboin) has made some modifications to the backend that should eliminate, or at least reduce the frequency of those crashes.

There were some calls that were only routed to the RPC-2 node, and RPC-2 was the one crashing most of the time. It has now been changed so that RPCs 1,2, and 3 all share the load that RPC-2 had to handle by itself before. This should, at least in theory, fix the problem that was causing RPC-2 to crash intermittently.

Performance and RPC Proxy

The main official RPC (rpc.blurt.world) is a cluster of five RPC nodes with an RPC proxy in front of it. The RPC proxy receives the calls from the frontend interfaces and routes the calls to the appropriate RPC node that is set up to be able to handle those calls

The RPC proxy software that is currently in use on the official RPC is not a very fast one and slows down communication between the RPC and the frontends. The core infrastructure maintainer is in the process of building a better, more performant, RPC proxy that will be a couple orders of magnitude faster than the current one. Meanwhile, he has tweaked the code of the current one to make it more performant while we wait to get the new one finished. You may notice that Blurt websites are a bit faster to load now. You will notice another increase in performance once the new RPC proxy is built and running on our infrastructure.

Communities on Blurt

As some of you already know, the Blurt infrastructure has had support for the communities feature on Blurt for a while now. Some of the independently-operated frontends have already added community features to their own websites. The official Blurt interfaces should also have these community features. That is why the core team is negotiating with a team of developers who will be adding community features to the main user interfaces on blurt.blog and blurtwallet.com.

In the meantime, we do have an official communities viewer on the Blurt mobile and PWA desktop app https://pwa.blurt.blog/ (Find it in the menu!).

Adding communities also means changing the way frontends communicate with the RPCs, and should also help with eliminating the current issue we are having with RPC nodes crashing.