The release aims to eliminate congestion in the transaction propagation queues. Nodes now monitor eachother's mempools, eliminating a significant amount of the communication during transaction distribution.
Additionally, the upgrade speeds up the downloading of missing transactions from new blocks (an event which has increased in frequency during the transaction distribution issues).
Also, fixes #304.
Upgrade instructions
N.2.4.4.0 comes with the prebuilt binaries for the Linux and Darwin x86_64 platforms. arweave-2.4.4.0.linux-x86_64.tar.gz works at least on Ubuntu 20 and CentOS 8. To run on Ubuntu 18 grab arweave-2.4.4.0.ubuntu18-x86_64.tar.gz. CentOS 7 is not supported.
Download the corresponding archive and unpack it:
tar -xzf arweave-2.4.4.0.linux-x86_64.tar.gz
It makes sense to unpack it inside a dedicated directory. You can always move this directory around, but the miner may not work if you move only some of the files. The weave data would, by default, be stored in this directory, too, but it can be overridden using the data_dir command-line argument.
The archive contents look like this:
bin/ data/ erts-10.3/ lib/ releases/
To run the miner, execute ./bin/start . See the mining guide for more details.
If your OS/platform architecture is not in the list, check README for how to build the miner from sources.
If you want to run the miner from the existing Git folder, upgrade Erlang to version 23 and execute the following command:
git fetch --all --tags && git checkout -f N.2.4.4.0
You can now run the miner using the arweave-server script.
Support
For more details on how to run a mining node, please see our mining guide - https://docs.arweave.org/info/mining/mining-guide. If you have any issues upgrading or would like to know more about the release, feel free to reach out to us in the #mining channel on Discord Arweave Dev Talk server (https://discord.gg/DjAFMJc) or email us at team@arweave.org.