Hi all,
I noticed that there’s some confusion around the message in the Dashboard that says node status update every two hours. This is meant as a general indication that certain kinds of updates can take up to that much time, but in practice it depends. Actually, in the Dashboard that’s live on testnet, this message has been updated to “90 minutes”. We’ll see why below.
With the introduction of the farmerbot, there are now three statuses for a node:
- Up
- Standby
- Down
Seems simple enough, but these have a specific definition in the context of viewing the nodes list in the Dashboard. Since we’re using uptime reports as one data source to determine whether nodes are online or offline in this case, the current uptime reporting period of 40 minutes is an important factor.
Here’s a slightly simplified overview of how the states are defined:
- Up - the node has reported uptime within two time the reporting periods (80 minutes) and it’s power state indicator for farmerbot management is “Up”
- Standby - the node has a power state of "Down and has reported uptime within 24 hours
- Down - all other cases (node hasn’t reported uptime for two reporting cycles and it’s power state is not set to “Down”, or the power state is set to “Down” but the node hasn’t reported uptime for more than 24 hours
Actually most of the changes between these states are reflected instantly, as soon as the relevant events happen on TF Chain, or the node falls out of the 24 hours standby period. There’s just one case where it takes more time:
- Up => Down (this is reflected in the dashboard up to 80 minutes after the node goes down, depending on when it submitted its last uptime report before powering off)
So that’s the story. This message was added to the dashboard because farmers were asking why their nodes still showed online when they had powered them off. The answer is that without actually trying to contact the node directly, the dashboard has no way of knowing whether nodes are really on or off in the moment.
Hope you enjoyed this post and found it helpful 