The WAX ecosystem is highly active with many new games being announced, multiple collections releasing NFTs each week. This is very fun, but brings some noticible effects where CPU costs are increasing and all the public endpoints are getting a high load, often in bursts. This resulted in a situation last week where we had over 40 million requests in queue while it kept building up faster than we could serve them, even after our additional hardware and ratelimiting we worked on last few months.
This has been fixed and everything has been working well since this occured. We have once again updated our rate-limiting rules, where some requests have a longer floating window than before. This should allow normal users to utilize our API endpoint without issues, but someone running a bot farm or a heavy DAPP that require a lot of requests for each account will get ratelimited.
On top of this, we are also implementing additional scaling solution on top of our API infrastructure, which should allow us to serve a lot more requests, while at the same time providing a more reliable service even when we get the spam bursts like last week. We are in the process of powering up a full secondary hyperion cluster with multiple replicas on high speed discs. This should also result in further performance and reliability improvements.
For us, providing a free and fully open API endpoint is essential for any public blockchain, and something we prioritize in our work. Users should always have a good option to get their account data, if they are not available to query, is it really a fully public ledger?
We are working on a new Educational platform
We think that the information and entry point into WAX can become better and more streamlined. For a new user they get linked articles and videos by multiple authors and have to read many different ones to understand the basics without any good outline. We hope to solve this and present the first step of this platform before next update. Keep your eyes and ears open.
On our educational platform, everything will bee freely available and high quality.
Summary
Unless we run into some major issues we hope to have the next step in scaling our API infrastructure ready within weeks. And soon thereafter we hope to go public with our Rate-limiting details. We are also investigating the options, cost and timeframe to build out an additional datacenter.
If you have any questions, reach out to Anders on one of the social media channels, you find him under on Twitter and Telegram.