Kusama Validators Litep2p - Monitoring and Feedback

[lexnv]

This is a placeholder issue for the community (kusama validators) to share their feedback, monitoring and logs.

We’re excited to announce the next step in improving the Kusama network with the introduction of litep2p—a more resource-efficient network backend. We need your help to make this transition successful!

Enable Litep2p Backend

We’re gradually rolling out litep2p across all validators. Here’s how you can help:

1. Ensure you're running the latest Polkadot release (version 2412 or newer).
2. Restart your node with the following flag

--network-backend litep2p

Rollout Plan

• Phase 1: We need around 100 validators to start the transition.
• Phase 2 (in a few days): Increase to 500 validators running litep2p.
• Phase 3: Full rollout—inviting all validators to switch.

Monitoring & Feedback

Please keep an eye on your node after restarting and report any warnings or errors you encounter. In the first 15–30 minutes after the restart, you may see some temporary warnings, such as:

    Some network error occurred when fetching erasure chunk
    Low connectivity

We'd like to pay special attention to at least the following metrics:

• Sync peers (substrate_sync_peers)
• Block height (substrate_block_height)

Tasks

Preview Give feedback

1. litep2p authority discovery is very slow 5m vs 1h #7077
   +0

[alexggh]

This is a concern for me: #7077, we should pay attention to this.

[alexggh]

This is a concern for me: #7077, we should pay attention to this.

And this is the impact, I assume it was because validators restarted to use litep2p, but we should keep an eye on this if it is keep repeating.

https://grafana.teleport.parity.io/goto/-FyJtnvNg?orgId=1

[alexggh]

This is a concern for me: #7077, we should pay attention to this.

And this is the impact, I assume it was because validators restarted to use litep2p, but we should keep an eye on this if it is keep repeating.

Confirm with paranodes, he had some validators that were constantly restarting, so that was the reason for this finality delays.

[eskimor]

And what was the reason for constantly restarting?

[alexggh]

And what was the reason for constantly restarting?

Paranode had a script that restarted on low connectivity, which is exactly what this #7077 will produce.

Nevertheless, even after the script was stopped we are still seeing occasional lower spikes in finality because of no-shows on around ~20 validators, I'm working with @lexnv to understand what might cause that, because it perfectly correlates with the enablement of validators with litep2p.