Holochain Core & Networking: Since the last Dev Pulse, we’ve published the first three releases of Holochain 0.5 with our new networking engine Kitsune2. While the focus of this release was network reliability, the improvements we’ve made will mostly be felt as dramatically better DHT performance. In our tests, and tests in the field, it shows shorter and more consistent syncing times for DHT data. CPU usage appears to have decreased significantly as well. One of the team is calling it “a good step forward for Holochain”.

There is a new behavior with Kitsune2 and performance enhancement. When a new node joins a network, there’ll be a time of initial DHT synchronization, during which they won’t immediately get any new data published by their peers since they joined. This is because they haven’t advertised themselves as full-arc nodes yet and so won’t be targeted for publishing to. But once they’ve synchronized with the other peers, it “goes like blazes and data just appears like it was authored locally”, in the words of a team member. So new users should still expect data to sync slowly for the first few minutes; this is normal.

It’ll still be a bit before we recommend that app developers update their projects to Holochain 0.5 — we’re seeing some connectivity issues which we believe we’ve identified as a simple misconfiguration which we’ll correct, test, and hopefully release soon. We also still need to update the scaffolding tool. If you’re brave and want to get a head start on an existing app, you can read the 0.5 upgrade guide.

In the Holochain 0.6 development line, the team is investigating bottlenecks in the conductor runtime. They’ve already addressed one long-standing issue of degrading performance as source chains grow — we’re now seeing a 30-40% improvement in ad-hoc dev testing, with possibly more improvements to come.

Testing: All of the test scenarios in Holochain 0.4 have been converted from our older TryCP-based scale testing framework to Wind Tunnel , and we’re now in the process of updating them for Holochain 0.5, as well as streamlining the process for deploying Wind Tunnel client nodes with Nomad. Dev team members are setting up test machines all around the world, and we’re looking at options for increasing the number of test machines.

Dev Docs: Lastly, we’ve published some new documentation in the Build Guide:

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