This commit converts all block height references to int32 instead of
int64. The current target block production rate is 10 mins per block
which means it will take roughly 40,800 years to reach the maximum
height an int32 affords. Even if the target rate were lowered to one
block per minute, it would still take roughly another 4,080 years to
reach the maximum.
In the mean time, there is no reason to use a larger type which results
in higher memory and disk space usage. However, for now, in order to
avoid having to reserialize a bunch of database information, the heights
are still serialized to the database as 8-byte uint64s.
This is being mainly being done in preparation for further upcoming
infrastructure changes which will use the smaller and more efficient
4-byte serialization in the database as well.
This commit contains three classes of optimizations:
- Reducing the number of unnecessary hash copies
- Improve the performance of the DoubleSha256 function
- A couple of minor optimizations of the ShaHash functions
The first class is a result of the Bytes function on a ShaHash making a
copy of the bytes before returning them. It really should have been named
CloneBytes, but that would break the API now.
To address this, a comment has been added to the function which explicitly
calls out the copy behavior. In addition, all call sites of .Bytes on a
ShaHash in the code base have been updated to simply slice the array when
a copy is not needed. This saves a significant amount of data copying.
The second optimization modifies the DoubleSha256 function to directly use
fastsha256.Sum256 instead of the hasher interface. This reduces the
number of allocations needed. A benchmark for the function has been added
as well.
old: BenchmarkDoubleSha256 500000 3691 ns/op 192 B/op 3 allocs/op
new: BenchmarkDoubleSha256 500000 3081 ns/op 32 B/op 1 allocs/op
The final optimizations are for the ShaHash IsEqual and SetBytes functions
which have been modified to make use of the fact the type is an array and
remove an unneeded subslice.
This commit contains the entire btcchain repository along with several
changes needed to move all of the files into the blockchain directory in
order to prepare it for merging. This does NOT update btcd or any of the
other packages to use the new location as that will be done separately.
- All import paths in the old btcchain test files have been changed to
the new location
- All references to btcchain as the package name have been changed to
blockchain
