As alluded to in Friday’s post, today’s article will be focusing on the improvements the Oyster development team has made to the protocol for the week of June 3rd — June 9th.

This week the development team worked on making changes in the web interface and broker node so that the web interface can send the binary data instead of the data already in trytes form. These changes will dramatically cut down on the bandwidth used during uploads and will also put less file manipulation burden on the client. Additionally, the team formulated an optimization that will likely be used if Oyster decides to implement its own sharding method for our broker nodes.

The development team also worked on improving the hashing method for merging treasure indexes. Improving this hashing method will increase the unpredictability of the treasure index’s location of any given sector. If the treasure index centralizes in one area, the treasure will be easier to find. The hashing improvement will distribute the treasure indexes uniformly through the sector. Work was also completed on improving the broker nodes’ scalability by moving large binary data outside our MySQL database and into Badger, a persistent key-value store.

In addition to the work mentioned above, the development team also worked on optimizing webpack build scripts to remove bloat that was introduced when the team ejected from the react-scripts. Additionally, the team began implementing web workers to hand-off some of the protocol’s more process-intensive tasks. Furthermore, the team also worked on bringing back the Telegram bot that was first showcased during the testnet. The underlying framework of the bot will serve as a possible entry point for third parties that want to store files with Oyster. The team also finished implementing Prometheus, which is used to monitor jobs and actions occurring in the protocol.

Finally, the development team worked on more QA involving web nodes, broker nodes, and real uploads from the web interface. This led to several associated bugs being fixed in the system.

Oyster will be continuing to release these updates on a weekly basis, so we encourage our community always to check our blog throughout the upcoming weeks to stay up to date with the work the Oyster development team has been completing.