lighthouse-pulse/consensus/fork_choice
Paul Hauner 4c7bb4984c Use the forwards iterator more often (#2376)
## Issue Addressed

NA

## Primary Change

When investigating memory usage, I noticed that retrieving a block from an early slot (e.g., slot 900) would cause a sharp increase in the memory footprint (from 400mb to 800mb+) which seemed to be ever-lasting.

After some investigation, I found that the reverse iteration from the head back to that slot was the likely culprit. To counter this, I've switched the `BeaconChain::block_root_at_slot` to use the forwards iterator, instead of the reverse one.

I also noticed that the networking stack is using `BeaconChain::root_at_slot` to check if a peer is relevant (`check_peer_relevance`). Perhaps the steep, seemingly-random-but-consistent increases in memory usage are caused by the use of this function.

Using the forwards iterator with the HTTP API alleviated the sharp increases in memory usage. It also made the response much faster (before it felt like to took 1-2s, now it feels instant).

## Additional Changes

In the process I also noticed that we have two functions for getting block roots:

- `BeaconChain::block_root_at_slot`: returns `None` for a skip slot.
- `BeaconChain::root_at_slot`: returns the previous root for a skip slot.

I unified these two functions into `block_root_at_slot` and added the `WhenSlotSkipped` enum. Now, the caller must be explicit about the skip-slot behaviour when requesting a root. 

Additionally, I replaced `vec![]` with `Vec::with_capacity` in `store::chunked_vector::range_query`. I stumbled across this whilst debugging and made this modification to see what effect it would have (not much). It seems like a decent change to keep around, but I'm not concerned either way.

Also, `BeaconChain::get_ancestor_block_root` is unused, so I got rid of it 🗑️.

## Additional Info

I haven't also done the same for state roots here. Whilst it's possible and a good idea, it's more work since the fwds iterators are presently block-roots-specific.

Whilst there's a few places a reverse iteration of state roots could be triggered (e.g., attestation production, HTTP API), they're no where near as common as the `check_peer_relevance` call. As such, I think we should get this PR merged first, then come back for the state root iters. I made an issue here https://github.com/sigp/lighthouse/issues/2377.
2021-05-31 04:18:20 +00:00
..
src Advance state to next slot after importing block (#2174) 2021-02-15 07:17:52 +00:00
tests Use the forwards iterator more often (#2376) 2021-05-31 04:18:20 +00:00
Cargo.toml Update external deps (#1711) 2020-10-05 08:22:19 +00:00