Cardano-node: Ignoring block already in DB

Staking & Delegation Operate a Stake Pool
1

We’ve had Info level messages in our SimpleView log files at least since cardano-node 1.19.1 that look like this:

[relay-xxx:cardano.node.ChainDB:Info:254] [2020-10-10 18:12:48.24 UTC] Ignoring block already in DB: <hash> at slot 10787277

This week I noticed we were really getting a lot of these messages on one of our 2 relays, so decided to count them. With 1.19.1 they appeared about 6 times more often on our remote relay (the one geographically far away from our block producer) than on our relay on the same subnet as our block producer.

But since upgrading to cardano-node 1.20.0 (where we still are) the remote relay gets this message 40 times as much as the local one. For the remote relay, we have over 10,000 of those messages since we upgraded (on 24 September)… one every 2 or 3 minutes on average.

Our topology is error free and all our nodes are running far below their capacity. We’d just like to know if the uneven distribution of these messages might be a warning sign. I understand this would be a normal consequence of forking but not

  1. why we’d see it 40 times as often on one of our relays than the other, or
  2. why the disparity between the relays reporting this condition has (perhaps coincidentally?) increased with a newer version of cardano-node.

thanks :sunglasses: :pray:

2

If your node receives a block which you have already in your local DB, then it make sense to ignore that and move on.

Check/ping the peers your relay nodes are connected