Witness Update and Call to Action - Feb 13th, 2018

It's been a while since I posted a witness update. My node has been running flawlessly and I still haven't missed a block. Let's see how long that streak can stay. I've been keeping a close eye on my server to ensure smooth functionality of the system.

Rank

Firstly, thank you everyone who gave my witness a vote! I'm currently ranked 110 in the charts. Most of my votes received were through Hive account@steemdunk's popularity on the rise. Every vote helps keep the service alive with more room for growth.

Price feed updates

I switched off of steemfeed-js as it had too many issues. There was a dirty hack to restart it on a cronjob, but that simply wasn't good enough to be considered a reliable feed. I'd prefer to not have to restart the process every time to make sure the feed still works.

Hive account@yabapmatt has developed another price feed script. I've been running it standalone for a while and it's holding up quite well. On top of that, @GINAbot now provides for outdated price feeds. I'll still be keeping an eye on the server, but this reduces the need to do so as much.

Call to action for all witnesses

Many witnesses have broken price feeds! Running a price feed is a small part of being a witness. I do not have any votes for witnesses that entirely broken feeds, so that isn't a concern. I have, however, went through my witness vote list and removed my vote for witnesses that has an outdated price feed from up to 5-12+ hours. It is normally fine to have it outdated within a 24 hour time period, however I'm filtering out incompetent witnesses that will let it lag behind every so often.

I will be checking this more frequently and removing votes from witnesses who can't keep their feed updated and adding back votes that I know are competent. There are plenty of ways to run a price feed and keep it up to date! There are no excuses for broken feeds.

I removed my vote from Hive account@busy.witness as they keep missing blocks. I'll consider adding my vote again when their node is reliable. My vote will only remain for quality witnesses and I will be keeping a closer eye on the witnesses.

Steemdunk updates

This is where my time gets sunk into. I've done a great deal of changes these past few weeks to the service. The service now has its own GitHub org and has been migrated to use Hive account@privex servers. As it keeps growing, I may have to upgrade the server in the future. It is planned to expand into more servers to ensure the service has a safety failover in case of an emergency.

RPC plans

I still would like to run a full RPC node for the community. However, my rank is currently too low to fund this type of project. As my rank climbs though, it'd certainly be great as not all of the top 20 witnesses run a full node (though they can certainly afford it).

Server specs

I'm using Hive account@privex to host my witness node. As the blockchain keeps growing, I'll have to upgrade this server to keep up with the ever expanding memory requirements of running a node.

• 32 GB of RAM
• 2x240GB SSDs
• Intel Xeon CPU E3-1270 v3 @ 3.50GHz
• 1 GBPS network connection

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Together we build the community.

I'm always available on steemit.chat or Discord

Click here to vote @samrg472 for witness or go to https://steemit.com/~witnesses