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## Issue Addressed
NA
## Proposed Changes
Missed head votes on attestations is a well-known issue. The primary cause is a block getting set as the head *after* the attestation deadline.
This PR aims to shorten the overall time between "block received" and "block set as head" by:
1. Persisting the head and fork choice *after* setting the canonical head
- Informal measurements show this takes ~200ms
1. Pruning the op pool *after* setting the canonical head.
1. No longer persisting the op pool to disk during `BeaconChain::fork_choice`
- Informal measurements show this can take up to 1.2s.
I also add some metrics to help measure the effect of these changes.
Persistence changes like this run the risk of breaking assumptions downstream. However, I have considered these risks and I think we're fine here. I will describe my reasoning for each change.
## Reasoning
### Change 1: Persisting the head and fork choice *after* setting the canonical head
For (1), although the function is called `persist_head_and_fork_choice`, it only persists:
- Fork choice
- Head tracker
- Genesis block root
Since `BeaconChain::fork_choice_internal` does not modify these values between the original time we were persisting it and the current time, I assert that the change I've made is non-substantial in terms of what ends up on-disk. There's the possibility that some *other* thread has modified fork choice in the extra time we've given it, but that's totally fine.
Since the only time we *read* those values from disk is during startup, I assert that this has no impact during runtime.
### Change 2: Pruning the op pool after setting the canonical head
Similar to the argument above, we don't modify the op pool during `BeaconChain::fork_choice_internal` so it shouldn't matter when we prune. This change should be non-substantial.
### Change 3: No longer persisting the op pool to disk during `BeaconChain::fork_choice`
This change *is* substantial. With the proposed changes, we'll only be persisting the op pool to disk when we shut down cleanly (i.e., the `BeaconChain` gets dropped). This means we'll save disk IO and time during usual operation, but a `kill -9` or similar "crash" will probably result in an out-of-date op pool when we reboot. An out-of-date op pool can only have an impact when producing blocks or aggregate attestations/sync committees.
I think it's pretty reasonable that a crash might result in an out-of-date op pool, since:
- Crashes are fairly rare. Practically the only time I see LH suffer a full crash is when the OOM killer shows up, and that's a very serious event.
- It's generally quite rare to produce a block/aggregate immediately after a reboot. Just a few slots of runtime is probably enough to have a decent-enough op pool again.
## Additional Info
Credits to @macladson for the timings referenced here.
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| beacon_chain | ||
| client | ||
| eth1 | ||
| eth2_libp2p | ||
| genesis | ||
| http_api | ||
| http_metrics | ||
| network | ||
| operation_pool | ||
| src | ||
| store | ||
| tests | ||
| timer | ||
| websocket_server | ||
| Cargo.toml | ||