Shutting down Testnet and Sandboxnet historical nodes

🛠️ Builders
1

Hello Flow builders,

Every time Flow testnet or sandboxnet is sporked, one access node (AN) and one execution node (EN) from the previous spork are kept running to serve data for the previous network. For example, when testnet was last sporked on Jan 30th 2023 to testnet-41, an access node and an execution node on testnet 40 have been running since. These old nodes are referred to as the public historical nodes.

The endpoints of these old nodes are mentioned here.

As you can see, over a period of time, we have ended up with a large number of these public historical nodes (one AN-EN pair for each network).

However, it was observed that these old nodes are not being utilized at all, and no API request of any type (gRPC or REST) was made to those historical nodes.

Hence, we would like to do one of the following:

  1. Shutdown all of these old historical nodes

  2. Shutdown all but retain the historical node from the last network. So only retain testnet-40 (previous network) nodes running along with testnet-41 (current network), and then we spork again to testnet-42, shutdown testnet-40 and only keep testnet-41 running.

  3. Shutdown all but retain the historical nodes from the last two networks instead of just one. So retain testnet-39 and 40 along with testnet-41(current network).

Please let us know your preference (option 1, 2 or 3)?

This will only affect testnet and sandboxnet historical nodes and will not affect mainnet historical nodes.

Thank you,

Flow Team

2

I think retaining at least the previous spork’s access node would be helpful ie #2

3

#2 is good I guess, no need to keep more than one for sure, even considering testnet, I think #1 is also feasible. You should’t rely on previous protocol state on testnet anyway.

4

The tribe has spork - #2 Shutdown all but retain the historical node from the last network it is.

5

Heads up - We will starting the process to delete all but the last historical node (n minus 1) for testnet and sandboxnet.
No change to mainnet historical nodes.

6

Next week (the week of 15th May), we will be starting the process of shutting down the historical nodes on testnet and sandboxnet as described in this post.

7

It appears that the testnet’s historical nodes have been taken offline. If we still need to retrieve data, such as emitted events from these historical nodes, would setting up these nodes ourselves be the best course of action?