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Sanity checks

This document is intended for anyone testing or benchmarking the Consensus component outside this repository, for instance cardano-node or cardano-node-tests. We describe a series of sanity check that can be performed to rule out some known problems.

Enable assertions​

Even if the Consensus code is being benchmarked, it might be a good idea to temporarily enable assertions to perform additional checks on consistency. The following snippet can be added to the cabal.project file to enable assertions in our two main components:

package ouroboros-consensus
  flags: +asserts

package ouroboros-consensus-cardano
  flags: +asserts

Double check configuration sanity​

  • The k value has to be the same for all eras.
  • The SnapshotInterval has to be manually set or it will be computed as 2*k slots, which will have a huge negative impact on performance if k is small.
  • The mempool capacity is set by default to 2 times the maximum transaction capaciy in a block. Check if this default makes sense in the given context.