Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!
Switching to RK is crucial for major network-wide future advances such as accelerating mainnet to 10-BPS (10-BPS testnet-11 runs solely on RK nodes), upgrading to Dagknight, supporting smart-contract opcodes, etc. However, it also provides the following immediate benefits to node maintainers:
Near-constant storage: Unlike golang nodes which only prune transaction data, RK nodes constantly prune headers as well, hence node disk usage is lower and nearly constant.
Fast sync times: RK heavily utilizes parallelism to accelerate header and block processing. This is mostly notable during IBD where RK nodes enjoy increased processing throughput and are significantly faster.
RPC software stack: RPC interfaces have an enhanced design and will be extended in the near future (with a fully-featured transaction index being a notable example)
Transition strategy & technical details
We aim for a gradual process where more and more nodes slowly switch to RK. The following provides detailed instructions for the upgrade based on your specific use case:
Rust open beta participants: Version 0.14.1 contains several stability fixes for issues that have been reported over the beta testing period. It is highly recommended that you upgrade to this version as soon as you can for the reliable operation of your node (if you upgraded to 0.14.1 RC during the last week, there’s no need to take any action)
Golang node maintainers: Pick a random number between 0–7. Wait this amount of days before you switch your node to RK. Note that RK uses a completely different database, so you’ll need to resync the new RK node from the network. If possible, keep the former golang node up and running in parallel to the new node for a stability period.
Golang archive node maintainers: RK supports a robust archival mode, but a full archive migration process was not deployed yet. If you wish to keep your archive continuous, keep the golang node for now, a DB migration process will be implemented and announced.