We have been doing a lot of internal tests and today we started an internal test network operating over the internet. This test network uses a snapshot from BitShares on July 9.
So far things are running very smoothly. The total RAM usage after importing all of BitShares and registering 100,000 new accounts is still under 222 MB of memory, which with OSX memory compression enabled actually compresses a large part of that down to just 115MB. With our modest flooding of the network at 10 transactions per second CPU usage was less than 2%. When I compare this to BTS1.0 I see it uses 1.5 MB of memory and with compression 632 MB resides in active use. So the is an 83% memory reduction for the same amount of data.
We are putting the finishing touches on the protocol as we prepare to launch a public test network.
Thank you all for hanging in there. We don't get many opportunities to completely revamp a protocol and so we are taking our time to make sure we can live with what we have for a long time. This means designing in features for expansion.
Things we have left to do prior to a wide spread public test network:
1. Release BitShares 0.9.3 with extra API for dumping private keys for an account to facilitate easy importing into Graphene.
2. A lot of GUI work is left to be done.
3. The CLI wallet needs some usability improvements to expose all of the features.
In the spirit of getting things released and upgraded in a timely manner, we have decided to delay the bond market feature until 2.1 which will be the first feature enabled by stakeholder approval. This decision is mostly based around minimizing the surface area that we need to test prior to launch.
See you all in mumble tomorrow!