The Swarm Foundation has just released Bee v1.6! Please update your nodes!

This latest release is an accumulation of a lot of work done in the last couple of months by the team. We’ve improved and refactored substantial amount of components and areas of the codebase as well as fixed a few critical bugs. The node now has an option to bootstrap the postage information partially from a snapshot stored on Swarm(!). This saves on the initial syncing time significantly, and reduces the amount of chain calls you would need to do.

​​After deploying this version your node will need a complete blockchain resync, so please allow it time to sync and in case you’re updating several nodes at the same time — make sure to stage the update in a way that does not cause a lot of them to go offline at the same time due to the long restart time caused by chain syncing.

Breaking changes

• Global pinning has been discontinued from bee. We’re looking for ways to enable this sort of solution as an L2 solution on Swarm (#2906, #2869)
• Nodes will now try to connect to the mainnet by default. In order to connect to the testnet you must specify --mainnet=false (#2859)

Hardening

• Chain syncing errors will again result in 24h blocking (#2922)
• We’ve improved resilience on hibernation and network failure (#2887)
• Added a missing stream reset stream on add context header fail (#2885)

New features

• Added a new db indices command to debug database indices (#2924)
• Added a wallet endpoint to display wallet information for various purposes (#2900)
• Exposed current block height from chain backend for the chainstate endpoint so that chain syncing status can be displayed (#2893)
• The node will now log its own overlay address on startup (#2930)
• Print required funds for gas and respect deployment gas price (#2861)
• The node has now an option to bootstrap the postage information partially from a snapshot stored on Swarm(!). This saves on the initial syncing time significantly, and reduces the amount of chain calls you would need to do (#2814, #2910)

Bug Fixes

• Added fallback content length check in middleware (#2907)
• Fixed a bug where unpinning of encrypted references resulted in an error (#2896)
• Fixed a panic for the stewardship endpoint in dev mode (#2889)
• CORS are now allowed in dev mode (#2866)
• Fixed a deadly deadlock in sharky that was caused when a context was cancelled on a Read call (#2932, #2948)
• Fixed a bug where an error on shutdown would cause issues when reloading stamp issuers on startup (#2914)
• Fixed a bug where the wrong amount was displayed when purchasing a postage stamp in dev mode (#2945)
• Removed the free slot optimization from sharky to circumvent shard leakage (#2953)

Performance improvements

• The postage package has been rewritten and has significant simplifications that should result in a smoother and more correct operation (#2810, #2890, #2895)

For the full release notes including a complete PR rundown, please read here