Engineering Update - Week 2, Feb 2016

Hi everyone,

We plan to do the weekly engineering updates on Mondays, which will cover the previous week. This allows for any work done over weekends to also get included in the updates and we all can start our week by syncing up on what happened in the previous week. Here are some highlights from last week:

1. Blockstack Registrar getting stable: Onename recently noticed a spike in registrations when the .id namespace was featured in a French article. This stress tested the throughput of the open-source registrar and a bunch of improvements were made. Currently, with the latest version of registrar we can achieve a rate of x operations per block by using x HD wallet keys (x can be 100 under heavy load) and the current version can pretty much run on auto-pilot. This is the repository to use if you plan on doing bulk registrations on any namespace!

2. Blockstack Resolver now works with Nginx and uWSGI: For the longest time we’ve used Apache to deploy the resolver. Last week, we added support for Nginx as well. We actually ended up testing the resolver deployment under a very heavy load and fine-tuned some performance optimizations. Stay tuned for a blog post or Github instructions for these performance improvements (quick hints: use bare metal uWSGI, limit no. of processes to no. of cores on the VM + 1 additional master, and pay special attention to no. of open sockets allowed by the kernel and bump up memory allocated to memcached.)

3. New CLI with wallet plus other goodies: There is a bunch of work going on for a new cli version that has a built in wallet and simplifies the UX a lot. We’ll post more details about it in a future update, but here is a quick sneak peak into what the cli wallet interface is looking like:

muneeb@amsterdam$ blockstack wallet
Enter wallet password: *******
Unlocked wallet.
------------------------------------------------------------
Payment address:	16yE3e928JakaXbympwSywyrJPM9cuL4wZ
Owner address:		1UGQbEV6JXEk1onBzDoNGikrCjeXenA75
------------------------------------------------------------
Balance:
16yE3e928JakaXbympwSywyrJPM9cuL4wZ: 0.011625
------------------------------------------------------------
Names Owned:
1UGQbEV6JXEk1onBzDoNGikrCjeXenA75: [u'temptemptemp.id']
------------------------------------------------------------

Please feel free to post other updates in this thread. This is meant to be a discussion and not one-sided updates.

Cheers,

– Muneeb

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