Remove unnecessary status call from connect method

[livthomas]

I have just noticed that all Tendermint/Comet clients make an additional call to /status when they are being created by connect method. This is very unfortunate, especially when the client is being created and destroyed very often.

Is it really necessary to make this call? Because from the comment, it looks like the author of this code was not even sure what he was doing. Just because of some failing CI job, all applications around the world using cosmjs library make double calls to RPC nodes.

I refer to the following code:

• https://github.com/cosmos/cosmjs/blob/main/packages/tendermint-rpc/src/tendermint34/tendermint34client.ts#L38-L42
• https://github.com/cosmos/cosmjs/blob/main/packages/tendermint-rpc/src/tendermint37/tendermint37client.ts#L38-L42
• https://github.com/cosmos/cosmjs/blob/main/packages/tendermint-rpc/src/comet38/comet38client.ts#L38-L42

It looks like this code was added there three years ago whenTendermint34Client class was first implemented. Nobody has ever changed it and it was just copied over to new classes (Tendermint37Client and Comet38Client).

[webmaster128]

It's a mystery why it's needed by every time I tried to remove it, the CI tests start failing. The way this was designed is more optimized for longer living tendermint clients.

[livthomas]

If that code is removed, does it break the client itself or is it just about CI tests failing?

• If the client doesn't work without making this initial call, what about using a HEAD request or some kind of low-level network call that wouldn't count towards rate limits?
• If it breaks the CI tests, I would suggest to simply run that code conditionally only in CI.

[webmaster128]

The first approach is not so easy because the rpc client does not have low level access and could be different transports.

I don't know if it is ONLY a CI issue. I know this is annoying for some users but I prefer to either get the root cause debugged or keep it as is.

I suggest the simplest way for you to fix your use case is using create instead of connect with a manually created HttpClient.