I don't know how to start this update.. The world is at a crazy place, best of wishes to everyone that struggle with the current situation in any way. With that said, we are still focused and working on adding more value and improving our products in the WAX ecosystem.
We have once again (never ending work, ey?) working on the caching, response time and capacity of our WAX API Infrastructure. We are currently seeing an avg requests per minute around 100k, with bursts that go higher. I have taken out some screenshots of data for the last few days, just to provide an idea of what is going on.
*We see the response code of the requests that reach our API to the left, where we can see that we have a constant high load of requests.
**To the right you can see the response time it takes between when we get your call, and until we got that data from the backend. Some calls that were just requested might be cached on both these levels and that is when the responsetime can go below the 6 decimals we collect, and thereby show 0, that is why the minimum can be so low.
Over the last year, we have been working on optimizing and tweaking the caching we have for our WAX API. The last months, we have improved this quiet a bit, together with a new and improved system to handle spam, with better rate limit and banning for reoccuring abuse.
To break down this system, each type of call, have a different rule for how it is cached. What that means is that each time you do a request to us, we look at that exact request, and then ask the optimized backend machine for that specific information. Then if you or anyone else ask for that exact information within the set timeframe of our caching, that request is now being serverd from the front-end cache, instead of the back-end node. This will result in a higher capacity, as the back-end node is one of the major limiting factors on how many requests we can handle.
One side we work with, is to add more specialized back-end nodes, depending on which type of call we get most. And the other side is to optimize this cache in the front-end. This is also why, if you do get_info calls for the latest block information, this might show the last block, instead of the current. This is great to increase capacity and responsetime for DAPPs, where they often request the same data multiple times within a short time-frame. Sometimes, multiple dapps request the samme information from the same account, within a very short time-fram. This is probably partly because some users that interact with the different games, play multiple games at the same time in different tabs.
New information section on our Frontpage!
This section is created as a curated and easy way for anyone landing on our front-page to find good information and tools related to the WAX ecosystem. We got a list of WAX NFT Marketplaces, Block Explorers, Developer resources as well as content creators. We hope that this will help new and existing users to locate the information they are searching for.
Summary
As you may notice, we put in a lot of time in our API infrastructure, but not only that. We have also upgraded multiple of our machines to secure them for the growth of WAX. We are also currently looking at additional machines to add to our Cluster of nodes. Working with a growing and active blockchain that has a growing demand is fun, challenging and exciting.
We have also continued to work on the academy, where we have put forth 4 new lessons, as well as refined some of the older ones. This is something we will continue to do moving forward. Soon we will also add a section on Blockchain Basics, to further help educate users. With the academy, we hope to have created a great tool for community managers, support personell and active users in the community to find good content to use as reference when talking to new users. We also hope that it will serve as a place for current users that would like to further understand WAX, can do so.