Geth package ancient folder

[luisalrp]

Full blockchain need. lot of storage that most of it does not have sense to have it in a fast and NVMe or SSD, because it not accessed too much.

geth already has"--datadir.ancient" parameter to store ancient data, so I would like that the installer of geth package asks where to install the ancient data instead of the whole package. That way, I can mount cheap HDD nd point ancient data there. I think both options does not have sense.

Thanks!

┆Issue is synchronized with this Basecamp todo by Unito

[dapplion]

@luisalrp I really like the idea, thanks for the suggestion. @eduadiez what do you think?

[dapplion]

@eduadiez bump

[JHGrove3]

This sounds great!

Geth added the ability to create a Freezer on a hard drive. Check out this blog post -- see the section titled "Freezer"

https://blog.ethereum.org/2019/07/10/geth-v1-9-0/

[heueristik]

Yes, please support an ancient drive. That would be really a great feature.

[pablomendezroyo]

@3alpha Would it be hard to implement this? I guess it affects mainly dappmanager installation process

[heueristik]

Not only for geth, but also for Lighthouse's freezer DB feature (https://github.com/sigp/lighthouse/pull/508#issuecomment-558465291)

--freezer-dir <DIR>  Data directory for the freezer database.

This has a lot of advantages:

• It would give people more room to run an Ethereum full node with just 1 TB SSD space by using much cheaper HDD space
• It makes it easier to resync when
  • you migrate to another machine as you don't need to download the entire state again or
  • your hot DB got corrupted because of a crash

[3alpha]

@3alpha Would it be hard to implement this? I guess it affects mainly dappmanager installation process

I don't think so. I think it could be dealt with within Installation wizard. It would only become messy if we were to deal with migrations. At first, I wouldn't deal with that. Maybe down the road.

[heueristik]

Any update on this? Would be really nice to have 🙏

[heueristik]

Since the disk requirement will increase after the Dencun upgrade (only ~50 GB but eventually more in the future), this becomes more of a topic.

[heueristik]

A freezer / ancient DB will also be supported by the Reth execution client 🥳.

See the idea https://github.com/paradigmxyz/reth/discussions/6510, actual PR https://github.com/paradigmxyz/reth/pull/6444, and milestone https://github.com/paradigmxyz/reth/labels/A-static-files.

[Szboy]

I was able to get geth to connect to an external ancient folder by binding the default ancient location to my external hdd path however a native solution in DAppNode is very much needed, especially with the size of the chain now, and would save a lot of headaches.