Verbaltech2 - BitShares Witness Report - Monthly Update

I have been very busy in April on several fronts, devoting much time to designing a new docker based system for deploying full nodes. Docker is a virtualization technology that is revolutionizing the way software is tested and deployed into production. It is a stripped down, modular version of tools like VirtualBox, Vagrant and VMWare that provides the ability to run "computers inside a computer", or in other words allows a computer to simulate itself.

There are several benefits of this architecture as it applies to a decentralized blockchain. These include isolating witness nodes from direct connection to the Internet (connections are only made through seed nodes, no p2p connections for witnesses), reduction in time to get a new node operational, more versatile choices for the host operating system and encapsulation of all functional elements in a single container.

As for replacing existing, problematic nodes I have brought 2 new 64GB RAM nodes online, but have not yet added them into production quite yet but will be in the next few days or so as I wrap up the details of the new architecture.

There is a lot to be done. With witness wackou stepping away from his witness role I may need to implement another approach to feed publishing. For now feeds look stable. If I do change the feed tools I use to publish I will still retain bts_tools for their monitoring functionality, which provide the graphs seen in these witness reports.

Failover protection is working very well now and barring any major multi-host node or Internet catastrophe missing large numbers of blocks are a thing of the past. However, the elephant in the room few are discussing is what to do about the increase in missed blocks all witnesses are experiencing. The cause of this is still uncertain, but the best theory I've heard is that the increase in the number of accounts has resulted in more overhead and the work to be done to tabulate votes and other maintenance once an hour (the current maintenance interval set by the committee) is occasionally enough to interfere with generating a timely block when it is required.

There was also an increase in the number of witnesses from 21 to 25 in April, so existing witnesses will be paid 16% less. Here is the market summary since last month (all prices via CMC): BTC=$9,096.31, BTS=$0.36, STEEM=$3.94, PPY=$6.51.

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That's it for this month folks, enjoy the long awaited spring in the month of May!

France

Germany

Germany (different provider & datacenter)

Japan

Floating / Extra Full Node:

Node is online and doing well but bts_tools on this node is not so I have no graphs. Due to docker changes and testing

And the testnet server for BTS:

Node is online and doing well but bts_tools on this node is not so I have no graphs. Due to docker changes and testing

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