In this blog post, we briefly cover how to prepare a server to host a high-performance GoEthereum full node, like one needed for Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, Avalanche or Harmony One. The audience of this guide are developers who need to do a high volume, millions to billions, of JSON-RPC API requests and they greatly benefit from the low latencies and network bandwidth of running GoEthereum locally.
Running your own node is a much more efficient approach than using any of free or commercial Ethereum JSON-RPC API service providers for your blockchain data read needs.
Getting a server
You cannot run the world financial system on Amazon EC2 instance or Raspberry Pi. The disk IO is too slow.
Demanding blockchain full nodes, also knows as blockchain clients, need a server with a fast NVMe SSD disk and plenty of disk space. Your best bet for affordable servers is Hetzner.
Here is a sample server that is with added 2 * 2 TB SSD disks.
Setting up the server and partitioning the disk
All information on the full node is discardable - it is public data after all. Thus, to maximize the disk space utilisation we set 2 x 2 TB disks in RAID0, which gives us a total of 4 TB available disk space with doubled read and write speed.
For Hetzner, they offer a rescue tool that allows you to reinstall the operating system and partition the disk. For this step, advanced Linux administration skills are recommended.
We set up the operating system using Hetzner's installimage.
The Hetzner server comes with 1x512 GB root disks and our additional 2X2TB disk. installimage cannot handle any advanced RAID setup, so we do it later on the Linux root command prompt after booting the server. Here we just declare the root and boot partitions.
We also choose xfs over ext4, as the former tend to work better with large volume.
Setting up the large RAID0 partition for the GoEthereum full node
Our server boots up with Ubuntu 20.04 installed and we can SSH in for the first time. We follow the RAID set up instructions from kernel.org.
First let's see how Hetzner installimage partitioned our disks.
fdisk --list
Disk /dev/nvme0n1: 476.96 GiB, 512110190592 bytes, 1000215216 sectors
Disk model: WDC PC SN720 SDAPNTW-512G
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xfbb3d767
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/nvme0n1p1 2048 33556479 33554432 16G fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/nvme0n1p2 33556480 34605055 1048576 512M fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/nvme0n1p3 34605056 1000213167 965608112 460.4G fd Linux raid autodetect
Disk /dev/nvme1n1: 476.96 GiB, 512110190592 bytes, 1000215216 sectors
Disk model: SAMSUNG MZVL2512HCJQ-00B00
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x4bc0643a
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/nvme1n1p1 2048 33556479 33554432 16G fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/nvme1n1p2 33556480 34605055 1048576 512M fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/nvme1n1p3 34605056 1000213167 965608112 460.4G fd Linux raid autodetect
Disk /dev/nvme2n1: 1.88 TiB, 2048408248320 bytes, 4000797360 sectors
Disk model: SAMSUNG MZVL22T0HBLB-00B00
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk /dev/md2: 920.64 GiB, 988511469568 bytes, 1930686464 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 524288 bytes / 1048576 bytes
Disk /dev/md1: 511 MiB, 535822336 bytes, 1046528 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk /dev/nvme3n1: 1.88 TiB, 2048408248320 bytes, 4000797360 sectors
Disk model: SAMSUNG MZVL22T0HBLB-00B00
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk /dev/md0: 31.99 GiB, 34324086784 bytes, 67039232 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 524288 bytes / 1048576 bytes
lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
nvme0n1 259:0 0 477G 0 disk
├─nvme0n1p1 259:1 0 16G 0 part
│ └─md0 9:0 0 32G 0 raid0 [SWAP]
├─nvme0n1p2 259:2 0 512M 0 part
│ └─md1 9:1 0 511M 0 raid1 /boot
└─nvme0n1p3 259:3 0 460.4G 0 part
└─md2 9:2 0 920.6G 0 raid0 /
nvme1n1 259:4 0 477G 0 disk
├─nvme1n1p1 259:6 0 16G 0 part
│ └─md0 9:0 0 32G 0 raid0 [SWAP]
├─nvme1n1p2 259:7 0 512M 0 part
│ └─md1 9:1 0 511M 0 raid1 /boot
└─nvme1n1p3 259:8 0 460.4G 0 part
└─md2 9:2 0 920.6G 0 raid0 /
nvme2n1 259:5 0 1.9T 0 disk
nvme3n1 259:9 0 1.9T 0 disk
Disks nvme2n1 and nvme3n1 are untouched, so we are going to create a RAID0 group /dev/md3 out of them.
mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md3 --level=stripe --raid-devices=2 /dev/nvme2n1 /dev/nvme3n1
You get
mdadm: chunk size defaults to 512K
mdadm: Defaulting to version 1.2 metadata
mdadm: array /dev/md3 started.
Formatting the partition for GoEthereum
Then we format this device for XFS and set up the mount point
mkdir /polygon
mkfs -t xfs -f /dev/md3
Test mounting the new drive
mount /dev/md3 /polygon
cd /polygon
df -h .
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/md3 3.8T 27G 3.7T 1% /polygon
We have 3.8T disk space available on our EUR 71.00/month server.
Now as the final touch let's add the /dev/md3 partition to fstab so that it survives over the boot.
Get the UUIDs of the disks with blkid
blkid
/dev/nvme0n1p1: UUID="0cce9579-0f8c-21e2-75c5-67f762482229" UUID_SUB="bbb8dee8-3b68-c2ef-e074-e2ced4433425" LABEL="rescue:0" TYPE="linux_raid_member" PARTUUID="fbb3d767-01"
/dev/nvme0n1p2: UUID="ae741f7c-00ca-fcb8-a0bb-749329fc0858" UUID_SUB="d0f74179-31dc-83e8-2016-65dd4650c82a" LABEL="rescue:1" TYPE="linux_raid_member" PARTUUID="fbb3d767-02"
/dev/nvme0n1p3: UUID="a98136a5-4d73-8f2d-117c-c6fba1fb222d" UUID_SUB="a516d587-23fe-3144-6d9b-4799e6144fb4" LABEL="rescue:2" TYPE="linux_raid_member" PARTUUID="fbb3d767-03"
/dev/nvme1n1p1: UUID="0cce9579-0f8c-21e2-75c5-67f762482229" UUID_SUB="cf16d91f-f838-0b52-cb48-241c73dd4741" LABEL="rescue:0" TYPE="linux_raid_member" PARTUUID="4bc0643a-01"
/dev/nvme1n1p2: UUID="ae741f7c-00ca-fcb8-a0bb-749329fc0858" UUID_SUB="4a4c63f5-2df8-2bc0-b755-6854d0731794" LABEL="rescue:1" TYPE="linux_raid_member" PARTUUID="4bc0643a-02"
/dev/nvme1n1p3: UUID="a98136a5-4d73-8f2d-117c-c6fba1fb222d" UUID_SUB="01c634d4-4ae7-ea19-ca63-e38ff32e4e96" LABEL="rescue:2" TYPE="linux_raid_member" PARTUUID="4bc0643a-03"
/dev/md2: UUID="30232920-f2ef-402d-ad64-32cfed2f06ca" TYPE="xfs"
/dev/md1: UUID="b3325d6d-1ce0-46d5-ba9c-4a17c4df99d6" TYPE="ext3"
/dev/md0: UUID="56ea3570-dbda-4f20-8eb8-30ea7da75e39" TYPE="swap"
/dev/nvme2n1: UUID="e27c7163-325d-13b1-227b-33fd1ce23f74" UUID_SUB="e01a5942-6016-43a0-13ea-29a5c177fa5b" LABEL="Ubuntu-2004-focal-64-minimal:3" TYPE="linux_raid_member"
/dev/nvme3n1: UUID="e27c7163-325d-13b1-227b-33fd1ce23f74" UUID_SUB="abfa183d-24cf-b3c7-a863-6ae8d92d2623" LABEL="Ubuntu-2004-focal-64-minimal:3" TYPE="linux_raid_member"
/dev/md3: UUID="09762c81-c367-4cd6-80d9-ef34e0e7dc62" TYPE="xfs"
Add an entry to /etc/fstab for /dev/md3
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
# /dev/md/0
UUID=56ea3570-dbda-4f20-8eb8-30ea7da75e39 none swap sw 0 0
# /dev/md/1
UUID=b3325d6d-1ce0-46d5-ba9c-4a17c4df99d6 /boot ext3 defaults 0 0
# /dev/md/2
UUID=30232920-f2ef-402d-ad64-32cfed2f06ca / xfs defaults 0 0
UUID=9762c81-c367-4cd6-80d9-ef34e0e7dc62 /polygon xfs defaults 0
Final test
Reboot the server and see the partition mounts correctly after the boot.
reboot now
SSH in again and check the partition is still there:
df -h /polygon
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/md127 3.8T 27G 3.7T 1% /polygon
Now you can proceed to have GoEthereum geth to use /polygon as its --datadir option.
If you get /dev/md127 issue after the reboot make sure your UUIDs in /etc/fstab and blkid command match.
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