The network has gradually stabilised over the past few weeks, with network load still elevated but not unexpected from such a large change in scale. This is generally caused by replication traffic being moved around by fewer nodes, so individual nodes are seeing more usage compared to previous.
Code Quality & Usability
Work continues on our more infrastructure based tools, with the release process getting a lot of attention. New functionality around automated test and deployment tools, such as smoke tests and backwards compatibility tests, has been implemented, allowing for more detailed testing and report generation prior to a formal release. This will continue to evolve as we target more distribution platforms.
Network Stability & Mainnet Improvements
New mechanics have been added to node to improve stability and security of the network. Specifically, node will now enforce a minimum version control, only communicating with and about nodes that meet this value to ensure outdated nodes slowly become uncontactable by others on the network. This will ensure that nodes running much older versions with different protocol versions and functionality are not impacting the majority of the network during normal operation. Work has also been done towards trust based replication scoring, allowing nodes to factor in peer trust when replicating data, again working to improve security of the network.
Payments
Changes have been made to the merkle payment data, compacting values to reduce on-chain transaction sizes, which in turn reduces the gas costs for merkle payments. Another major improvement to merkle payments is the fix for re-quoting chunks that already exist on the network. This reduces network traffic by preventing unnecessary payment attempts on uploads resuming, skipping chunks that are known to already exist.
Both merkle and regular payments now include a new client event for progressively saving payment receipts to disc. This is to better support upload resuming, as previously this only saved on failure.
These changes and more are going out as part of the todays release, which you can find here once live: https://github.com/maidsafe/autonomi/releases/latest
