Earlier this week an anonymous Chia user / developer ran code that significantly increased the Chia Blockchain transaction volume. After that knocked a number of farmers offline, either because of low powered hardware or because of being connected to too many low powered nodes to keep current with the blockchain, Chia Network promised to release an update “within the week” that addressed that issue in a few areas. And it seems they have.
Chia Blockchain 1.2.11 has a number of performance improvements for how the node handles transactions and the claim is that it should handle large transaction volumes better. But the real star of the show is integrated Mad Max and BladeBit plotters! This has been requested by the community and teased by the team for some time now, but it is finally here.
The one funny thing is that they apparently released an update to the plot NFT creation process which does not do anything. That seems like a big miss to me, when it could have been left out. Oh well, Mad Max!
Download the release here, and check out the patch notes here.
Added
- Performance improvements for nodes to support higher transaction volumes, especially for low powered devices like RaspBerry Pi. Full details at #9050.
- Improved multi-core usage through process pools.
- Prioritized block validation.
- Added transaction queues for more efficient handling of incoming transactions.
- Increased BLS pairing cache.
- Integrated the Bladebit plotter to CLI and GUI. Thanks @harold-b for all your hard work on this, and welcome again to the Chia Network team!
- Added the Madmax plotter to CLI and GUI. Thanks @madMAx43v3r for your support!
- Added option to configure your node to testnet using to
chia init --testnet.
I don’t see anything related to Madmax plotting in the new GUI settings or options when creating a plot. Any info on that?
Am I just to add plots with GUI like in the old days, one at a time, but now it will be using Madmax as its plotting engine, so very fast compared to the older GUI? Thanks.