This Month in Forest - March 2025

[LesnyRumcajs]

This Month in Forest 🌲

Welcome to the March edition of This Month in Forest! We are excited to share the latest updates and improvements to the Forest Filecoin client (and more!). 🌸

Highlights

Teep 🦵 incoming!

In the coming weeks, the NV25 will land on both the calibration network (March 26th) and the mainnet (April 11th). Being long due, it will introduce quite a bit! The upgrade scope:

• FIP-0097: Add Support for EIP-1153 (Transient Storage) in the FEVM
• FIP-0098: Simplify termination fee calculation to a fixed percentage of initial pledge
• FIP-0100: Removing Batch Balancer, Replacing It With a Per-sector Fee and Removing Gas-limited Constraints
• F3 Mainnet Activation

It's worth noting that the Forest team provided the implementation for FIP-0098! 🌲

Forest is ready for the Teep! Make sure to upgrade your nodes according to the upgrade schedule. You can track Forest NV25 support here.

Forest RPC benchmarks

benchmark v. trans. To subject (a system) to a series of tests in order to obtain prearranged results not available on competitive systems.
The Computer Contradictionary, Stan Kelly-Bootle

We're finalizing our first iteration on RPC benchmarks. After some discussions, we settled on k6, a battle-tested load-testing tool offered by Grafana Labs. We aim for the benchmarks to be node-agnostic so any node can be plugged into it.

Preliminary results look pretty promising! Thanks to these benchmarks, we already optimized eth_gasPrice, and we will investigate improving performance in other areas.

The results show a recent Forest 171bc86 (left) vs recent Lotus 1.32.1-dev+mainnet+git.dc6e6e398 (right) on mainnet, 30s duration benchmark under 20 concurrent virtual users! 🏇

Specs and recording of The Beast exporting a mainnet snaphot:

OS: Fedora Linux 40 (Workstation Edition) x86_64
Kernel: 6.13.7-100.fc40.x86_64
Host: Z790 UD AX
CPU: 13th Gen Intel i9-13900KF (32) @ 5.500GHz
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090
Memory: 64119MiB

Development

RPC improvements and fixes

We have been working on improving the RPC methods and fixing some bugs. The most notable additions are:

• Filecoin.EthTraceTransaction,
• Filecoin.EthTraceFilter,
• Filecoin.EthGetFilterChanges

It's also worth noting that we moved the Ethereum RPC indexer to a background task, which is turned off by default. This should improve startup times, especially for nodes that don't need to serve Ethereum RPC requests. ⏱️

fix n. & v. trans. [Latin figere "to attack with reproaches, to render immovable."] 1 n. A palliative shot in the system's arm, becoming less effective with each application 2 v. trans. To remove [a bug] by redefining the program specification in order to take advantage of an unexpected feature.
The Computer Contradictionary, Stan Kelly-Bootle

And the most notable fixes are:

• Filecoin.EthGetLogs (incorrect handling of max_height for latest predefined block),
• Filecoin.EthGasPrice (slow and incorrect gas calculation - now it's both fast and correct!),

We are happy with the current state of the RPC methods; the vast majority of RPC methods are implemented now. We fixed all the bugs (we are aware of). 🐛 We'll continue to monitor and improve them as needed. 🔨

Other

As always, see the CHANGELOG for details. Note that it contains primarily client-facing changes, so if you're interested in the nitty-gritty details, you'll need to go through the commit history. 🤓