Man vs. Physics: The Power Grid Gets the Final Say

Hey everyone,

I know when to admit defeat.

For the last week, I have been fighting the good fight. I threw 80 CPU cores at a MongoDB restore. I wrote custom scripts to track pigz/mongorestore pipes in real-time. I split the workload into a "Triple Pincer" attack to bypass software locks.

And for the last few days, I watched my new 2TB SATA SSD scream for mercy, pinned at 100% utilization as it tried to digest billions of Hive transactions through a straw.

It was working. It was slow, painfully slow, but it was working.

And then, the lights went out.

We lost power here at the GM residence. No warning, just silence. One week of indexing, hundreds of gigabytes of progress, and the stubborn hope that SATA could handle an Enterprise workload... poof. Gone.

The Post-Mortem

There is a lesson here that I tried to ignore, but physics was kind enough to remind me: The medium matters.

My strategy was sound (the software tweaks were perfect), but the hardware was the hard limit. Trying to hydrate a full history node on a SATA interface is like trying to fill an Olympic pool with a garden hose. You can optimize the water pressure all you want, but you are still limited by the diameter of the hose.

The Objective: I am not giving up on the full node, but I am done fighting with one hand tied behind my back. An M.2 adapter and a proper NVMe drive are now on the shopping list. I need 3,000 MB/s write speeds, not 500 MB/s.

The Pivot

In the meantime, I’m not letting the iron go cold.

1. The Light Node: I am currently restoring the standard light node to get my services back online quickly.
2. Housekeeping: Since I'm in maintenance mode, I’m finally going to be giving some love to the some of the other code-bases, which haven't been updated in ages.

The Silver Lining

The week wasn't a total wash. While staring at progress bars and waiting on I/O, I started tinkering with a side project involving the x402 protocol.

I found some bugs in the reference implementation while playing around, and I’m happy to report that I’ve submitted two Pull Requests to the Coinbase git repo to fix them.

So, even if the database didn't survive, the code contributions did.

We rebuild. We upgrade. We move on.

As always,
Michael Garcia a.k.a. TheCrazyGM