.. image:: https://travis-ci.org/kyuupichan/electrumx.svg?branch=master :target: https://travis-ci.org/kyuupichan/electrumx .. image:: https://coveralls.io/repos/github/kyuupichan/electrumx/badge.svg :target: https://coveralls.io/github/kyuupichan/electrumx =============================================== ElectrumX - Reimplementation of electrum-server =============================================== :Licence: MIT :Language: Python (>= 3.5) :Author: Neil Booth Getting Started =============== See `docs/HOWTO.rst`_. Motivation ========== Mainly for privacy reasons, I have long wanted to run my own Electrum server, but I struggled to set it up or get it to work on my DragonFlyBSD system and lost interest for over a year. In September 2015 I heard that electrum-server databases were getting large (35-45GB when gzipped), and it would take several weeks to sync from Genesis (and was sufficiently painful that no one seems to have done it for about a year). This made me curious about improvements and after taking a look at the code I decided to try a different approach. I prefer Python3 over Python2, and the fact that Electrum is stuck on Python2 has been frustrating for a while. It's easier to change the server to Python3 than the client, so I decided to write my effort in Python3. It also seemed like a good opportunity to learn about asyncio, a wonderful and powerful feature introduced in Python 3.4. Incidentally, asyncio would also make a much better way to implement the Electrum client. Finally though no fan of most altcoins I wanted to write a codebase that could easily be reused for those alts that are reasonably compatible with Bitcoin. Such an abstraction is also useful for testnets. Features ======== - The full Electrum protocol is implemented. The only exception is the blockchain.address.get_proof RPC call, which is not used by Electrum GUI clients, and can only be invoked from the command line. - Efficient synchronization from Genesis. Recent hardware should synchronize in well under 24 hours, possibly much faster for recent CPUs or if you have an SSD. The fastest time to height 439k (mid November 2016) reported is under 5 hours. For comparison, JElectrum would take around 4 days, and electrum-server probably around 1 month, on the same hardware. - Various configurable means of controlling resource consumption and handling denial of service attacks. These include maximum connection counts, subscription limits per-connection and across all connections, maximum response size, per-session bandwidth limits, and session timeouts. - Minimal resource usage once caught up and serving clients; tracking the transaction mempool appears to be the most expensive part. - Fully asynchronous processing of new blocks, mempool updates, and client requests. Busy clients should not noticeably impede other clients' requests and notifications, nor the processing of incoming blocks and mempool updates. - Daemon failover. More than one daemon can be specified, and ElectrumX will failover round-robin style if the current one fails for any reason. - Coin abstraction makes compatible altcoin and testnet support easy. Implementation ============== ElectrumX does not do any pruning or throwing away of history. I want to retain this property for as long as it is feasible, and it appears efficiently achievable for the forseeable future with plain Python. The following all play a part in making ElectrumX very efficient as a Python blockchain indexer: - aggressive caching and batching of DB writes - more compact and efficient representation of UTXOs, address index, and history. Electrum Server stores full transaction hash and height for each UTXO, and does the same in its pruned history. In contrast ElectrumX just stores the transaction number in the linear history of transactions. For at least another 5 years this transaction number will fit in a 4-byte integer, and when necessary expanding to 5 or 6 bytes is trivial. ElectrumX can determine block height from a simple binary search of tx counts stored on disk. ElectrumX stores historical transaction hashes in a linear array on disk. - placing static append-only metadata indexable by position on disk rather than in levelDB. It would be nice to do this for histories but I cannot think of a way. - avoiding unnecessary or redundant computations, such as converting address hashes to human-readable ASCII strings with expensive bignum arithmetic, and then back again. - better choice of Python data structures giving lower memory usage as well as faster traversal - leveraging asyncio for asynchronous prefetch of blocks to mostly eliminate CPU idling. As a Python program ElectrumX is unavoidably single-threaded in its essence; we must keep that CPU core busy. Python's ``asyncio`` means ElectrumX has no (direct) use for threads and associated complications. Roadmap Pre-1.0 =============== - minor code cleanups. - implement simple protocol to discover peers without resorting to IRC. This may slip to post 1.0 Roadmap Post-1.0 ================ - Python 3.6, which has several performance improvements relevant to ElectrumX - UTXO root logic and implementation - improve DB abstraction so LMDB is not penalized - investigate effects of cache defaults and DB configuration defaults on sync time and simplify / optimize the default config accordingly - potentially move some functionality to C or C++ Database Format =============== The database format of ElectrumX is unlikely to change from the 0.10.0 version prior to the release of 1.0. ChangeLog ========= Version 0.10.3 -------------- * Add an RPC call to force a reorg at run-time, issue `#103`_ * Make flushes and reorgs async, issue `#102`_ * add Argentum and Digibyte support to coins.py (protonn) Version 0.10.2 -------------- * The **NETWORK** environment variable was renamed **NET** to bring it into line with lib/coins.py. * The genesis hash is now compared with the genesis hash expected by **COIN** and **NET**. This sanity check was not done previously, so you could easily be syncing to a network daemon different to what you thought. * SegWit-compatible testnet support for bitcoin core versions 0.13.1 or higher. Resolves issue `#92`_. Testnet worked with prior versions of ElectrumX as long as you used an older bitcoind too, such as 0.13.0 or Bitcoin Unlimited. **Note**: for testnet, you need to set **NET** to *testnet-segwit* if using a recent Core bitcoind that broke RPC compatibility, or *testnet* if using a bitcoind that maintains RPC compatibility. Changing **NET** for Bitcoin testnet can be done dynamically; it is not necessary to resync from scratch. Version 0.10.1 -------------- * Includes what should be a fix for issue `#94`_ - stale references to old sessions. This would effectively memory and network handles. Version 0.10.0 -------------- * Major rewrite of DB layer as per issue `#72`_. UTXOs and history are now indexed by the hash of the pay to script, making the index independent of the address scheme. * The history and UTXO DBs are also now separate. Together these changes reduce the size of the DB by approximately 15% and the time taken to sync from genesis by about 20%. Note the **UTXO_MB** and **HIST_MB** environment variables have been removed and replaced with the single environment variable **CACHE_MB**. I suggest you set this to 90% of the sum of the old variables to use roughly the same amount of memory. For now this code should be considered experimental; if you want stability please stick with the 0.9 series. Version 0.9.23 -------------- * Backport of the fix for issue `#94#` - stale references to old sessions. This would effectively memory and network handles. Version 0.9.22 -------------- * documentation updates (ARCHITECTURE.rst, ENVIRONMENT.rst) only. Version 0.9.21 -------------- * moved RELEASE-NOTES into this README * document the RPC interface in docs/RPC-INTERFACE.rst * clean up open DB handling, issue `#89`_ Version 0.9.20 -------------- * fix for IRC flood issue `#93`_ Version 0.9.19 -------------- * move sleep outside semaphore (issue `#88`_) Version 0.9.18 -------------- * last release of 2016. Just a couple of minor tweaks to logging. Version 0.9.17 -------------- * have all the DBs use fsync on write; hopefully means DB won't corrupt in case of a kernel panic (issue `#75`_) * replace $DONATION_ADDRESS in banner file **Neil Booth** kyuupichan@gmail.com https://github.com/kyuupichan 1BWwXJH3q6PRsizBkSGm2Uw4Sz1urZ5sCj .. _#72: https://github.com/kyuupichan/electrumx/issues/72 .. _#75: https://github.com/kyuupichan/electrumx/issues/75 .. _#88: https://github.com/kyuupichan/electrumx/issues/88 .. _#89: https://github.com/kyuupichan/electrumx/issues/89 .. _#92: https://github.com/kyuupichan/electrumx/issues/92 .. _#93: https://github.com/kyuupichan/electrumx/issues/93 .. _#94: https://github.com/kyuupichan/electrumx/issues/94 .. _#102: https://github.com/kyuupichan/electrumx/issues/102 .. _#103: https://github.com/kyuupichan/electrumx/issues/103 .. _docs/HOWTO.rst: https://github.com/kyuupichan/electrumx/blob/master/docs/HOWTO.rst