Snapshot Generation: Forest vs Lotus
Forest plays an important role in timely, efficient network snapshot generation: while it is possible to generate a snapshot with Lotus, doing so is significantly slower and more expensive. On a regular machine, Forest completes a basic chain snapshot export much faster than Lotus, and with a fraction of the memory.
Forest 0.33.6 finished the export in 34 minutes using 32 GiB of RAM. Lotus 1.36.0 took 450 minutes (about 13x slower) with 128 GiB, and 232 minutes (about 7x slower) even with 256 GiB. Forest also needs less than half the disk space for the resulting snapshot. The table below compares a basic snapshot export across implementations.
| Required disk space [GiB] | RAM [GiB] | Export duration [minutes] | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Forest | 200 | 32 | 34 |
| Lotus | 450 | 128 | 450 |
| Lotus | 450 | 256 | 232 |
Both implementations produce compatible snapshots and can consume snapshots produced by the other.
Lotus snapshots are not compressed by default; Forest compresses them as part of the export. Both implementations can consume compressed snapshots. Compressing a Lotus snapshot after generation is possible but adds further to the total time.