paritytech / paritytech/try-runtime-cli

Disk-backed externalities

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enhancement
Dominant language
Rust
Stars
25
Forks
29
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

Original issue https://github.com/paritytech/substrate/issues/14076


Prelude

Discussion in https://github.com/paritytech/substrate/issues/13562 expanded to include various topics other than lazy-download, including improving general performance and using a disk-backed database.

I am creating this issue to separate the discussion and progress around allowing the try-runtime-cli to accept a DB path for reading state, rather than loading all state into memory.

Motivation

Creating snapshots and loading state into memory is not a significant issue for chains like Polkadot and Kusama, but it can be for heavier-weight chains like Moonbeam with extensive state.

On these heavy chains:

  1. It takes a long time to create a snapshot, and the snapshot size is considerable.
  2. The state might not fit into memory, depending on the chain and machine specifications.
  3. It would provide a much better developer experience for using try-runtime-cli with these chains if developers could skip worrying about that and just specify the path to their existing database instead.

Implementation ideas

  • TestExternalities currently has a hardcoded InMemoryBackend as a generic parameter. However, that could be updated to a more generic sp_state_machine::Backend.
  • Once that change is made, we should be able to use either an InMemoryBackend or DiskDbBackend (which is already implemented in fudge) in TestExternalities.
  • We can add a new Mode to remote-externalities called something like Disk, so we would have Online, Offline (perhaps rename this to Snap), and Disk.
  • Finally, we can update the CLI to accept live, snap, and a new option db when specifying where to get state. If the user chooses db, they pass the path, and the TestExternalities will be initialized with a DiskDbBackend instead of the InMemoryBackend.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start with TestExternalities, its hardcoded InMemoryBackend parameter, and the remote-externalities Mode handling described in the issue. Review the sp_state_machine::Backend interface and the existing DiskDbBackend implementation in fudge, then trace how the CLI currently selects live and snap state sources. Done means a database path can select disk-backed state without loading the full snapshot into memory.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
rust
Domain
cli, databases, testing
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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