Ledger Pruning

[zhyatt]

Summary
Allow optional pruning of ledger blocks, excluding pending blocks, possibly down to a configurable amount of depth starting at and including the frontier block on each account, as well as after a configurable amount of time. Related CLI, RPC and other changes will be needed to support this.

What problem would be solved by this feature?
With the ever increasing ledger size and high throughput capabilities of the network, over time the amount of disk space required to store the full ledger will increase the cost of hardware required to do so. Pruning will help reduce the storage required by only keeping the most recent blocks, each of which contain the full state of the account.

Dependencies

• Experimental Ledger Pruning - the initial implementation of ledger pruning for experimentation and further expansion (does not allow pruning on voting nodes)
• State block version 2 activation - the final version of ledger pruning may require activation of state block version 2 in order to most efficiently filter block traffic for older blocks based on the newly added block height field in v2 blocks. This is still under evaluation.

Related Links

• Original GH Issue
• Forum discussion