Survey for BSC archive node

BNB Smart Chain
1

As we know developers are limited to query the limited recent blocks to check the balance of an address and the state of a smart contract with a full node, while they can query any block with an archive node.
In order to supply better solution for archive node service, start a survey:

  1. Which type application do you use BSC archive node?
    1.1 Automatic trading system needs historical data to optimize trading model
    1.2 Verification modules need state data to verify transactions in time
    1.3 Analytical tools need full historical data to do data analysis
    1.4 Exchange in some wallets depends on archive node for fast and efficient transfers
    1.5 Others, please share more detail.

  2. Is it easy to run a BSC archive node for you? Any question?

  3. How far back is historical state data needed, the recent 5000,000 blocks? Or all the data from the genesis block?

Any feedback is welcome, thanks a lot~

4 Likes
2

We are currently running an Erigon archive node to do analytical jobs. For us it’s not so easy to run a BSC archive node, Erigon is literally the only choice but seems it doesn’t support BSC very well, the syncing usually stuck unexpectedly, to mitigate that we have to keep restarting it until it recovers syncing. Geth is better in stability, but it consumes too much disk space as an archive node.

We don’t need all of the history actually, we just need the recent 1 year history, Erigon is good at this part since it supports pruning history state that older than N(where N is specified on startup) — though N cannot be changed thereafter hence not so flexible.

I wish one day Geth and Erigon could adopt the advantages of each other, Geth supports pruning older history state and Erigon becomes more stable in syncing.

4 Likes
3

After BSC supports PBSS, it can prune the older history state. It may help. Let’s see what we can do after that.

3 Likes
4

Which type application do you use BSC archive node?
1.3 Analytical tools need full historical data to do data analysis
Is it easy to run a BSC archive node for you?
No, it requires a lot of time and resources but it’s a necessary for my application.
How far back is historical state data needed, the recent 5000,000 blocks?
I need all the data since genesis block.

Unfortunately, I don’t see many answers here, so let me describe my interactions with archive BSC nodes.
For my case, I used Erigon archive node until hard fork in April 2023. It had (and still has) some problems with up-to-date data synchronization but it required less resources and we hadn’t found that problem in the begining. Then there was an official statement from Erigon team that BSC archive node won’t be supported anymore. After long discussions with my team it was decided to move into Geth. It was expected that official solution won’t have problems with node in the future despite the fact of its enormous size. And here we are, less than a year, reading a statement that official node won’t have archive mode anymore.

3 Likes
5

Thanks for your reply. As you mentioned, Erigon and Geth has their own problems to run an archive node. We need to figure out a better way to run a BSC archive node. It is still under consideration. Any progress will be updated here.

1 Like