Consensus.PruneTarget to shrink consensus db

[hackschnitzel09]

Hi, I have set the Consensus.PruneTarget to 50000 but I cant see any decrease of the consensud db size.
There are no Logs that indicate, that something is happening.
How can I verify that it works and what would be the expected behaviour?

Thanks :)

[ChrisSchinnerl]

Unfortunately boltdb doesn't reclaim disk space even if you delete from it. So it will just prevent your database from growing further.

We are working on a prune command to make pruning easier here: SiaFoundation/coreutils#474

In the meantime the recommended way to reduce the size of the database immediately is stopping the host, deleting the consensus.db file and restarting with the instant sync flag hostd --instant.
If you seed is old and has been around since before the hardfork, you also need to switch to a new one for this to work.

[hackschnitzel09]

Ah i see, thx.
By hardfork you mean longer than 12 word seeds? So a 12 word should work fine?

[hackschnitzel09]

ok it looks like it is not that easy:
sia daemon startup failed: unable to instant sync: checkpoint height 442502 is before hardfork v2 require height 530000

[ChrisSchinnerl]

Before the v2 hardfork from 2025 at block height 530000. Seems like your seed is older.

So what you do then is

1. back up your current seed
2. stop hostd
3. delete consensus.db
4. update your hostd config with a brand new seed
5. start hostd with --instant
6. send the funds from your old seed to your new one (don't forget a test transaction with a small amount first)
7. in a couple of months come back and sweep your old seed again since it will have funds in it from contract payouts

[timrettop]

v2.12.0-beta.0 with a consensus.pruneTarget: 200 has reduced my consensus.db from 85GB to 8MB.