The current `prevector` size of 28 bytes (chosen to fill the `sizeof(CScript)` aligned size) was introduced in 2015 (https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/6914) before SegWit and TapRoot. However, the increasingly common `P2WSH` and `P2TR` scripts are both 34 bytes, and are forced to use heap (re)allocation rather than efficient inline storage. The core trade-off of this change is to eliminate heap allocations for common 34-36 byte scripts at the cost of increasing the base memory footprint of all `CScript` objects by 8 bytes (while still respecting peak memory usage defined by `-dbcache`). Increasing the `prevector` size allows these scripts to be stored on the stack, avoiding heap allocations, reducing potential memory fragmentation, and improving performance during cache flushes. Massif analysis confirms a lower stable memory usage after flushing, suggesting the elimination of heap allocations outweighs the larger base size for common workloads. Due to memory alignment, increasing the `prevector` size to 36 bytes doesn't change the overall `sizeof(CScript)` compared to an increase to 34 bytes, allowing us to include `P2PK` scripts as well at no additional memory cost. Performance benchmarks for AssumeUTXO load and flush show: - Small dbcache (450MB): ~1% performance penalty due to more frequent flushes - Large dbcache (4500-4500MB+): ~6-7% performance improvement due to fewer heap allocations Full IBD and reindex-chainstate with larger `dbcache` values also show an overall ~3% speedup. Co-authored-by: Ava Chow <github@achow101.com> Co-authored-by: Andrew Toth <andrewstoth@gmail.com> |
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ci | ||
cmake | ||
contrib | ||
depends | ||
doc | ||
share | ||
src | ||
test | ||
.cirrus.yml | ||
.editorconfig | ||
.gitattributes | ||
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CMakeLists.txt | ||
CMakePresets.json | ||
CONTRIBUTING.md | ||
COPYING | ||
INSTALL.md | ||
libbitcoinkernel.pc.in | ||
README.md | ||
SECURITY.md | ||
vcpkg.json |
Bitcoin Core integration/staging tree
For an immediately usable, binary version of the Bitcoin Core software, see https://bitcoincore.org/en/download/.
What is Bitcoin Core?
Bitcoin Core connects to the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network to download and fully validate blocks and transactions. It also includes a wallet and graphical user interface, which can be optionally built.
Further information about Bitcoin Core is available in the doc folder.
License
Bitcoin Core is released under the terms of the MIT license. See COPYING for more information or see https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT.
Development Process
The master
branch is regularly built (see doc/build-*.md
for instructions) and tested, but it is not guaranteed to be
completely stable. Tags are created
regularly from release branches to indicate new official, stable release versions of Bitcoin Core.
The https://github.com/bitcoin-core/gui repository is used exclusively for the development of the GUI. Its master branch is identical in all monotree repositories. Release branches and tags do not exist, so please do not fork that repository unless it is for development reasons.
The contribution workflow is described in CONTRIBUTING.md and useful hints for developers can be found in doc/developer-notes.md.
Testing
Testing and code review is the bottleneck for development; we get more pull requests than we can review and test on short notice. Please be patient and help out by testing other people's pull requests, and remember this is a security-critical project where any mistake might cost people lots of money.
Automated Testing
Developers are strongly encouraged to write unit tests for new code, and to
submit new unit tests for old code. Unit tests can be compiled and run
(assuming they weren't disabled during the generation of the build system) with: ctest
. Further details on running
and extending unit tests can be found in /src/test/README.md.
There are also regression and integration tests, written
in Python.
These tests can be run (if the test dependencies are installed) with: build/test/functional/test_runner.py
(assuming build
is your build directory).
The CI (Continuous Integration) systems make sure that every pull request is built for Windows, Linux, and macOS, and that unit/sanity tests are run automatically.
Manual Quality Assurance (QA) Testing
Changes should be tested by somebody other than the developer who wrote the code. This is especially important for large or high-risk changes. It is useful to add a test plan to the pull request description if testing the changes is not straightforward.
Translations
Changes to translations as well as new translations can be submitted to Bitcoin Core's Transifex page.
Translations are periodically pulled from Transifex and merged into the git repository. See the translation process for details on how this works.
Important: We do not accept translation changes as GitHub pull requests because the next pull from Transifex would automatically overwrite them again.