A few of months ago the IOHK team led by Ethereum Classic Developer Alan McSherry announced version 1.0 of Mantis, an Ethereum Classic client built in Scala. After the success of Mantis 1.0, the team has now released Mantis version 1.1 for Ethereum Classic users.
McSherry said the objective of the 1.0 release was to create a working product, while the 1.1 release endeavored “to take the working code and find and remove the performance bottlenecks. The most painful bottleneck identified was in synchronizing the blockchain. This was complicated by the fact that tuning that performance depends on quite a few factors, the speed of the network, the type of hard disk on the machine and the number and type of peers at the time of synchronizing.”
Apart from synchronizing performance, the “difficulty bomb” ECIP 1041 has been disabled – just in time as the block where this becomes important comes around in early this month.
One fix which made the priority list was how the block download progress is reported. Users reported it was confusing to see a 0.0% progress bar for such a long time when starting up. IOHK said that the reason for this is the synchronization for ETC is different to the synchronization for ADA, in that ETC implements ‘fast sync’ and ADA does not. The explanation and solution for this can be read below:
Fast sync downloads the state trie and the blocks in the blockchain. Ada has no fast sync and downloads only the blocks. In 1.0 the state trie was downloaded before the blockchain and when the state trie was fully downloaded the blocks began to download. The progress bar is only aware of the blocks and so continued to show “0.0%” while the state trie was being downloaded. In 1.1 the situation is better but not perfect. In 1.1, as a result of performance testing and improvements the block downloading begins straight away and the state trie downloads towards the end of the synchronization. The user will see the progress bar update as expected, however, towards the end of the synchronization, the progress will appear to stall. This happens while the state trie downloads. While this is not perfect and needs to be fixed, on the plus side the whole process is faster and so the frustration should be less. Thank you in advance for your patience with this.
The next release will be Mantis 2.0, currently scheduled for the end of 2018, around Q4. The 2.0 update will be a significant release with meaningful new functionality says McSherry.