This introduces a new indexing infrastructure for supporting optional
indexes using the new database and blockchain infrastructure along with
two concrete indexer implementations which provide both a
transaction-by-hash and a transaction-by-address index.
The new infrastructure is mostly separated into a package named indexers
which is housed under the blockchain package. In order to support this,
a new interface named IndexManager has been introduced in the blockchain
package which provides methods to be notified when the chain has been
initialized and when blocks are connected and disconnected from the main
chain. A concrete implementation of an index manager is provided by the
new indexers package.
The new indexers package also provides a new interface named Indexer
which allows the index manager to manage concrete index implementations
which conform to the interface.
The following is high level overview of the main index infrastructure
changes:
- Define a new IndexManager interface in the blockchain package and
modify the package to make use of the interface when specified
- Create a new indexers package
- Provides an Index interface which allows concrete indexes to plugin
to an index manager
- Provides a concrete IndexManager implementation
- Handles the lifecycle of all indexes it manages
- Tracks the index tips
- Handles catching up disabled indexes that have been reenabled
- Handles reorgs while the index was disabled
- Invokes the appropriate methods for all managed indexes to allow
them to index and deindex the blocks and transactions
- Implement a transaction-by-hash index
- Makes use of internal block IDs to save a significant amount of
space and indexing costs over the old transaction index format
- Implement a transaction-by-address index
- Makes use of a leveling scheme in order to provide a good tradeoff
between space required and indexing costs
- Supports enabling and disabling indexes at will
- Support the ability to drop indexes if they are no longer desired
The following is an overview of the btcd changes:
- Add a new index logging subsystem
- Add new options --txindex and --addrindex in order to enable the
optional indexes
- NOTE: The transaction index will automatically be enabled when the
address index is enabled because it depends on it
- Add new options --droptxindex and --dropaddrindex to allow the indexes
to be removed
- NOTE: The address index will also be removed when the transaction
index is dropped because it depends on it
- Update getrawtransactions RPC to make use of the transaction index
- Reimplement the searchrawtransaction RPC that makes use of the address
index
- Update sample-btcd.conf to include sample usage for the new optional
index flags
This commit is the first stage of several that are planned to convert
the blockchain package into a concurrent safe package that will
ultimately allow support for multi-peer download and concurrent chain
processing. The goal is to update btcd proper after each step so it can
take advantage of the enhancements as they are developed.
In addition to the aforementioned benefit, this staged approach has been
chosen since it is absolutely critical to maintain consensus.
Separating the changes into several stages makes it easier for reviewers
to logically follow what is happening and therefore helps prevent
consensus bugs. Naturally there are significant automated tests to help
prevent consensus issues as well.
The main focus of this stage is to convert the blockchain package to use
the new database interface and implement the chain-related functionality
which it no longer handles. It also aims to improve efficiency in
various areas by making use of the new database and chain capabilities.
The following is an overview of the chain changes:
- Update to use the new database interface
- Add chain-related functionality that the old database used to handle
- Main chain structure and state
- Transaction spend tracking
- Implement a new pruned unspent transaction output (utxo) set
- Provides efficient direct access to the unspent transaction outputs
- Uses a domain specific compression algorithm that understands the
standard transaction scripts in order to significantly compress them
- Removes reliance on the transaction index and paves the way toward
eventually enabling block pruning
- Modify the New function to accept a Config struct instead of
inidividual parameters
- Replace the old TxStore type with a new UtxoViewpoint type that makes
use of the new pruned utxo set
- Convert code to treat the new UtxoViewpoint as a rolling view that is
used between connects and disconnects to improve efficiency
- Make best chain state always set when the chain instance is created
- Remove now unnecessary logic for dealing with unset best state
- Make all exported functions concurrent safe
- Currently using a single chain state lock as it provides a straight
forward and easy to review path forward however this can be improved
with more fine grained locking
- Optimize various cases where full blocks were being loaded when only
the header is needed to help reduce the I/O load
- Add the ability for callers to get a snapshot of the current best
chain stats in a concurrent safe fashion
- Does not block callers while new blocks are being processed
- Make error messages that reference transaction outputs consistently
use <transaction hash>:<output index>
- Introduce a new AssertError type an convert internal consistency
checks to use it
- Update tests and examples to reflect the changes
- Add a full suite of tests to ensure correct functionality of the new
code
The following is an overview of the btcd changes:
- Update to use the new database and chain interfaces
- Temporarily remove all code related to the transaction index
- Temporarily remove all code related to the address index
- Convert all code that uses transaction stores to use the new utxo
view
- Rework several calls that required the block manager for safe
concurrency to use the chain package directly now that it is
concurrent safe
- Change all calls to obtain the best hash to use the new best state
snapshot capability from the chain package
- Remove workaround for limits on fetching height ranges since the new
database interface no longer imposes them
- Correct the gettxout RPC handler to return the best chain hash as
opposed the hash the txout was found in
- Optimize various RPC handlers:
- Change several of the RPC handlers to use the new chain snapshot
capability to avoid needlessly loading data
- Update several handlers to use new functionality to avoid accessing
the block manager so they are able to return the data without
blocking when the server is busy processing blocks
- Update non-verbose getblock to avoid deserialization and
serialization overhead
- Update getblockheader to request the block height directly from
chain and only load the header
- Update getdifficulty to use the new cached data from chain
- Update getmininginfo to use the new cached data from chain
- Update non-verbose getrawtransaction to avoid deserialization and
serialization overhead
- Update gettxout to use the new utxo store versus loading
full transactions using the transaction index
The following is an overview of the utility changes:
- Update addblock to use the new database and chain interfaces
- Update findcheckpoint to use the new database and chain interfaces
- Remove the dropafter utility which is no longer supported
NOTE: The transaction index and address index will be reimplemented in
another commit.
Dave Collins