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Pruning Configurations on Cosmos

📚 Pruning Overview​

Sourced from ValNodes

IAVL Pruning: Cache Pruning 🌱​

IAVL trees, in the cache, are regulated by pruning configurations residing in your app.toml. This configuration focuses exclusively on cache and dos not impact disk space.

  • If the pruning="default", the node conserves 100,000 blocks in the IAVL tree (cache). For instance, 100,000 blocks on @osmosiszone encapsulates around 7.5 days of data, and 3 days for @BandProtocol.
  • When pruning = "everything", the node eliminates everything from the cache at an interval of 10 blocks.

Pruning intervals and the number of blocks to prune can be fine-tuned by setting pruning = "custom". For example, pruning-keep-recent = 1000 retains the most recent 1000 blocks and pruning-interval = "7" prunes every 7 blocks. Remember, the pruning interval needs to be a prime number. This allows you to manage the IAVL in the cache but bears no relation to the disk.

In our encounters, utilizing custom pruning and maintaining pruning-interval = "7" and pruning-keep-recent = 100 has yielded optimum performance on @band, @regen, @osmosis, @Akash, and @cosmos.

Disk Pruning 📀​

Now, let's delve into the configurations that regulate pruning on the disk. The disk harbors three primary data files:

  • blockstore.db: Preserves all block-level intel.
  • application.db: Keeps all custom application data.
  • state.db: Holds validator, consensus, and abci data. This is of prime importance for slashing and associated validation.

Chain operators are obliged to retain, at the bare minimum, data for the unbonding period in state.db to shield against diverse short-range onslaughts with no penalties for validators.

Three configurations determine what must be eliminated at the termination of each commit: 1️⃣ Current Commit Height 2️⃣ Max Age Block ascertained in genesis.json 3️⃣ Minimum Retain Height defined in app.toml

The chain will discard everything below the lesser value of (max age block defined in genesis.json, current commit height - minimum retain height defined in app.toml).

No validator can override configurations to delete data within the bonding period. Even though the aforementioned configurations facilitate logical or soft deletions, the actual physical deletions from the disk are propelled by DB Configuration and Compaction.

Common pruning configurations​

Archive Node​

This will keep everything.

pruning = "nothing"
min-retain-blocks = 0

RPC/API Node​

This will keep enough recent blocks to serve common RPC/API requests.

pruning = "custom"
pruning-keep-recent = "50000"
pruning-interval = "997"
min-retain-blocks = "50000"

Validator Node​

This will keep a small amount of blocks, without tieing up your node with frequent pruning, which can cause misses.

pruning = "custom"
pruning-keep-recent = "10000"
pruning-interval = "997"
min-retain-blocks = "10000"