Add Consensus biweekly update at 2023-08-09 (#215)

--------- Co-authored-by: Nicolas Frisby <[email protected]> Co-authored-by: amesgen <[email protected]>
IntersectMBO · Aug 9, 2023 · 45018b1 · 45018b1
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+---
+title: Consensus Team Update
+slug: 2023-08-09-consensus
+authors: dnadales
+tags: [consensus]
+hide_table_of_contents: false
+---
+
+## High level summary
+
+This week the Consensus team worked on integrating the latest node release into the UTxO HD branch. Our ad-hoc benchmarks in which we sync a node from scratch showed that the LMDB backend uses around 8GB of memory.  We also released new versions of `fs-sim` and `fs-api`, and released `strict-checked-vars`.
+
+## UTxO-HD
+
+- Rebased UTxO-HD on top of node 8.2 ([issue](https://github.com/input-output-hk/ouroboros-consensus/issues/256))
+- Address new `Maybe` translations for UTxOs in Conway 1.6. ([PR](https://github.com/input-output-hk/ouroboros-consensus/pull/261)).
+- Performed ad-hoc benchmarking syncs with both implementations. The LMDB backend uses around 8GB of memory.
+- [Fixed](https://github.com/input-output-hk/cardano-node/compare/96e92351ad35cfce1b0c2c47c4ed05792bf81fad..90d4c93af0846c9b027d530c042180c51aeee4fd) an infinite loop on the mempool tracing code that was preventing the node from shutting down gracefully.
+- Fixed an infinite loop on the ledger state query for traversing queries that prevented the node from running `QueryUTxOByAddress` ([PR](https://github.com/input-output-hk/ouroboros-consensus/pull/273)).
+- Measured the speed of `QueryUTxOByAddress` under different `queryBatchSize` values. There is a significant performance degradation for these queries when using the UTxO-HD version. Using the mainnet UTxO set at slot 90 million, querying an address took 40 seconds using the in-memory backend and 90 seconds using the LMDB backend, whereas the baseline took 7 seconds. We need to investigate if we can improve this situation or whether an external service that runs alongside the node is a better solution.
+- Refactored and implemented ledgertable-related classes for the general `HardforkBlock`.
+
+## Genesis
+
+- [Frisby](https://github.com/nfrisby) and [Esgen](https://github.com/amesgen) continue to engage with the Researchers on grinding against the Genesis design.
+
+## Fostering collaboration
+
+- Drafted a document explaining versioning of local state queries [#273](https://github.com/input-output-hk/ouroboros-consensus/pull/273).
+
+## Support
+
+- [Frisby](https://github.com/nfrisby) is the release engineer this cycle.
+- Successfully created work-in-progress `ouroboros-consensus` and `cardano-api` commits that integrate the 2023 Aug 7 tip of `cardano-ledger`. This will require a release of `ouroboros-consensus`, which hasn't happened yet.