IDNA 2008 and Significant Improvements to State Channels, Nodes, System Stability

Further improvements of the Testnet are being implemented in preparation for Mainnet launch.

The æternity dev team is in the middle of preparing the next release that, as usual, will be deployed to the Testnet by the end of this week.

Last week, we accomplished integration as a result of our bounty for introducing IDNA 2008 support by our Naming System [PT task]. Big thanks to benoitc and his erlang-idna project! IDNA 2008 will significantly improve the usability of æternity’s Naming System by checking the consistency of names and helping to avoid type errors.

We have also finalized another big chunk of state channels components — now making it possible to address on-chain objects from a contract running in a state channel [PT task].

Improvements were done on how the nodes handle high loads. While performing load tests two weeks ago, we found that the mempool of a node can get overloaded with transactions. To circumvent such a scenario, overload detection and a backpressure mechanism for regulating the load of incoming transactions were implemented [PT task].

In addition, the overall stability of the system was improved by fixing a number of bugs and introducing additional system tests.

Follow all development progress in the Pivotal Tracker. If you have any questions, use the Forum to post them. The dev team will get back to you as soon as possible.