Partial State Archival

[SirTyson]

For protocol 23, I'm proposing we implement "partial" state archival. More context here.

[MonsieurNicolas]

Do you have a proposed network settings vote proposal that would need to go out with this change?
without it, the bucketlist size allocated to Soroban is going to be way too big.

[SirTyson]

I think for this particular change, we might need a different mechanism for settings upgrade. Since this is the first protocol upgrade to change the semantic meaning of a network config, we should probably change the network setting as part of the protocol upgrade. If we waited and did a proposal after the upgrade, there would be a significant delay between protocol upgrade and settings change since validators can't arm a queue of upgrades. During this delay, read and write fees would basically be free, since the "BucketList size" would change from ~12 GB to a few hundred MBs. If we did a settings upgrade before the protocol upgrade, we could mitigate the runaway growth attack, but would DOS the network in the time period between settings upgrade and p23 upgrade.

[MonsieurNicolas]

I guess it depends on how the "Soroban State Size" is calculated at the upgrade boundary. I think this is not specified in the CAP

[MonsieurNicolas]

It looks like you'd want it to be accurate from the get go. Default could be current size * 10 (arbitrary but "sane" default) until a network setting vote is applied

[MonsieurNicolas]

protocol meeting comment -- it sounds like we can just have validators vote back to back (still needs to be evaluated risk wise)

[tomerweller]

Overall this is excellent. I'd love to find a more descriptive name for this though. I think that "partial" is not a great indicator for what it is going on here and "live state prioritization" deals with the implications of this change rather than the change itself.
I think the change itself boils down to "where" the archive is located so maybe something like "validator side state archive" or something like that. Wdyt @SirTyson ?

[SirTyson]

Overall this is excellent. I'd love to find a more descriptive name for this though. I think that "partial" is not a great indicator for what it is going on here and "live state prioritization" deals with the implications of this change rather than the change itself. I think the change itself boils down to "where" the archive is located so maybe something like "validator side state archive" or something like that. Wdyt @SirTyson ?

Hmm, maybe "Validator State Archive" and "Offloaded State Archive", "Historical State Archive"? Idk about the last one, might get confused with the other History Archive.