Physical node expected useful lifespan

[Silvercap718]

There is always an expectation that, eventually , the node hardware will eventually fall below spec for network participation. What is the current expected lifespan of a physical node?

[Ferg40]

I would also like to know this.

[annie]

Hi @Silvercap718, @Ferg40, the SSD size of the Node is 500 GB and with 30GB consumed each month, the life span of the Node is around 16 months. However, we are working on an optimization plan for this, hopefully it will help increase the lifespan.

[Arnaldo_Rosario]

Why wasn’t this stated on the site that this has a lifespan? I have never head this before till now. Why did I spend money on something that wouldn’t even last 2 years! What is the plan when this stops working?

[Peter]

Hi Rosario, thanks for your suggestion. In theoretical way, the lifespan of the Node is mostly decided by the capacity of the SSD drive. The size of BTC blockchain is about 242 GB now. So your 500GB SSD would last for many years.
We are optimizing the network size. Rest assured that we will keep you posted.

[Rick_Shah]

Hi @annie, and @Peter, what is the current lifespan of a node with the recent optimization update?

[Silvercap718]

they made progress, just trying to find the thread…

[Jared]

Incognito reduces blockchain size by 90%

Incognito developers took a look at the blockchain and noticed some room for improvement. According to @hungngo, one of the devs on this project, there was “a lot of redundant data” in the blockchain, causing nodes to become “enormous” from syncing so much data. Well now, validators will be happy to hear that the blockchain has been reduced an average of 90%, and that there is much less consumption of data in the network process. This reduction took place in two main spots: The beacon, and sha…

Reduce Blockchain size by 50%

What privacy problem are you solving? Incognito Chain is consuming a lot of storage so far (over 100GB for 4 months). At this rate, the typical physical node device (500GB SSD) would run out of storage in about a year and a half, and virtual node expenses would increase substantially. It is thus essential to reduce the current size of Incognito Chain by by at least 50% (to about 50GB at the time of writing) The Incognito Chain has grown up extremely fast. After diving into the source code and a…

[Jerry_Watson]

Oh thank god, I was like whaaaaaaaaaaa…aaaaaa…

[Silvercap718]

Yeah I asked that question months ago and they answered it honestly and then set out to improve the lifespan! Great results and Great team here.

[Tempestblack]

Ok…I read this entire thread and I am left wondering that after all the upgrades to the blockchain and any other improvements to the pnodes themselves…what then at this time is the expected approximate lifespan of the pnode devices…and in addition when that time comes what will be then the options for the clients…basically what is Incognito’s game plan for it’s membership that will have been owning all these pnodes and supporting the project?

[hungngo]

Dear incognito fan, I am from Incognito Dev Team. These are some information you need, without the loss of generality, i will only demonstrate Shard 0 behavior:

• Shard 0 storage size: 7 GB (25 May 2020). Shard node will have Beacon database and shard 0 database. Shard 0 total transactions are about 33,000. Each transaction consume about 1 to 5 KBs.
• We launch mainnet in early Nov 2019.

So we can perform an easy calculation, 7GB for 7 months for shard 0. Shard 0 consume about 1 GB per month. With current increasing rate, it would take 40 years (500 month) for shard 0 to consume 500 GB.
But, Incognito are growing fast, shard 0 might take more than 1 GBs per months. Therefore, team are working hard everyday to reduced blockchain size. The recent upgrade reduced blockchain size by 90%, link.
Imagine if we immediately get 5 times more transaction per days, shard 0 would consume about 5 GB per month. 500 GB would be all consumed in about 10 years, which is a reasonable figure. Moreover, according Incognito design if Incognito chain gets 5 times more transactions, these transactions will be distributed equally among 8 shards. So increasing 5 times per shard mean 40 times in Incognito Chain.

Summary, in my point of view pNode lifespan would easily exceed 10 years. In this amount of time, a pNode would generate far much greater economic incentive compare to its price.

[Tempestblack]

Thank you to hungngo and the team for the response given. Once again I must compliment and thank the great teams that Incognito has in place. It is the teams that instill the confidence I have in the project and the teams themselves. Once again thank you for the honest and prompt response. Bottom line is that those of us with pnodes can be at ease that the lifespan of our pnodes are kept well in mind to the dev team and that they will not be running into any life expectancy issues any time soon…