A place for developers to talk about building on Farcaster.

/dev

How Farcaster Hubs work

Hubs validate, storage and replicate account messages to other hubs in a decentralized way. 

There are 3 main components: storage, p2p and sync.

1. Storage​
Messages received by Hubble are forwarded to the Storage engine which forwards them to the appropriate CRDT Set. Once validated by the CRDT Set, messages are persisted to RocksDB and events are emitted to listeners.

ah rocksdb, my old friend

Such a pain to optimize but I guess if it already has NodeJS bindings I can see why y'all went for it

Technowatermelon. Elder Millenial. Building Farcaster. 

nf.td/varun

Private eth-compatible L1 that tried to put complex TradFi transactions on chain 

LevelDB wasn't performant enough so we swapped it out for RocksDB as backing database for state trie

LSM based database compaction cycles can be a pain but to be fair that only becomes a problem at a certain scale & tx complexity

The latter - RocksDB is robust but has a lot of knobs to tweak. The docs are not bad but of course can't cover all permutations, and tended to focus more on Facebook's use cases. I learned a lot but for a startup with limited resources it can be a significant investment.

Did Rocks hold up or did it take a ton of work to optimize?