Blockchain storage consolidation
Editions: Daedalus
Background
- Daedalus wallet stores a copy of the blockchain on your local machine. These Blocks are continuously being consolidated.
- The Cardano blockchain continuously grows at a steady rate. New blocks are created every 20 seconds. Blocks are grouped together in Epochs which are 5 days long.
- Prior to Daedalus wallet version 0.12.0 blocks were downloaded and stored as individual files, this caused technical problems because the number of files was greater than 1.5 million.
Consolidation process
In Daedalus wallet version 0.12.0 blocks are still downloaded as individual files but then a consolidation process converts them to epoch files.
The most recent two epochs are stored as blocks, not as epochs for technical reasons.
Once consolidation takes place the number of files used to store the blockchain data is not more than 50000.
Benefits
Storing the blockchain in Epoch files reduces the number of files and hard drive space needed to store the blockchain. It also can improve the performance of the wallet in many ways.
Monitoring the consolidation process
We have a new screen designed to help users understand and monitor the consolidation process coming in Daedalus wallet version 0.13.0