Deploy two hosts for benchmarking nimbus-eth1 import

[jakubgs]

The development of nimbus-eth1 is ramping up, and for that reason we will need to perform benchmarking of the process of importing the network state data with validation from ERA files. Currently this process is not optimized, as it's in it's early stages of development, which means a full sync of mainnet would probably take more than a week. Despite that we need to start measuring results in order to figure out progress in import process optimization.

This benchmarking will require two kind of tests on two hosts:

• A long running test that lasts a week.
• A "short" running test that lasts 24 hours.

Both of those will not finish, so they will have to be aborted, but the amount of blocks they are able to sync will be the measure of performance. These performance reports will have to be archived in some way, simplest way would be to commit them to a dedicated repository. In addition to the reports gained this way the import process will make available a /metrics endpoint which we can scrape with Prometheus.

The two hosts can be purchased from Hetzner as the hosts will not be using external connections. The storage required will need to be at least 2x the size of Mainnet ERA and ERA1 files, which is currently ~1 2B, so a 2 TB additional NVMe would suffice. Aside from that more than 16 GB of RAM and 4 cores is enough.

[siddarthkay]

How urgently do we need the 2 hosts? I could either get a cheaper host from auction via Hetzner

OR

I could get a dedicated host which would be comparatively more expensive example : https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax52/

My assumption is that the host from Auction might take longer to get compared to the dedicated one.

[siddarthkay]

After discussing with @jakubgs, I finally went ahead with the following

2 x Dedicated Server AX42

• Location: Finland, HEL1
• For Finland, HEL1, support is only available in English.
• Rescue system (English)
• 1 x Primary IPv4
• 1 x 2 TB NVMe SSD
• 8 Core CPU
• 64 GB DDR5 ECC RAM

Order Details :

Possible wait times :

[siddarthkay]

These 2 AX42 hosts have been activated by Hetzner and currently boot into rescue system. I'll bootstrap these hosts and add them to our inventory.