Here in Austin, TX, April showers bring May torrential downpours. Despite the hundreds of road closures across the city, we’re here to briefly review what went on in April. This post is meant to be a friendly summary, but if you’re more interested in a longer-form and technical review, then please read our Grant Status Update here. Additionally, you can get insights in our Jira ticket log and Github report from this month.

April began with the release candidate 6.2.2-rc3 making its way into the testnet for a few rounds of stress tests. 6.2.2 contained two major fixes that held back 6.1.1: a high CPU utilization bug around the hold queue and a replay filter population bug. 6.2.2 also included contribution from Who Soup at Factomize and Adam Levy at Canonical Ledgers.

Sadly, things didn’t go perfectly on the mainnet. Rollout started with some audit servers with no issues. A couple of Federated servers upgraded just fine as well. After six ANOs had upgraded, though, there was an increased load amount. Even after the load dropped, the network prioritized consistency over liveness and just refused to move forward. The six ANOs downgraded to the prior version to restore the network.

Much of April went into hunting down the offending problems, and looks to be an issue where the code would send out two acknowledgements at the same process list height, causing conflicts. A solution was coded and placed into the release candidate for testing.

Coming up the pipeline, the Bond release will carry the fixes mentioned above, and has taken priority on getting it ready for release over the Parchment release. Bond will contain all kinds of fixes and work from both us and other developers, including Alex at Factoshi and Sander from BIF. The Parchment release is planned to have some strong capacity improvements that should look real good on the network alongside an API update from Tom at Layertech.

Additionally, you can find us at a few upcoming events, starting next week!

Despite April’s struggles, we’re looking forward to a very exciting May for us and the Factom Protocol. Thank you for your time and attention!