- Schwartz noted two recent incidents where peer counts dropped and nodes lagged.
- He said latency went up by less than 20%, and about 80% of peer connections were fine.
- Schwartz’s new data shows connection counts averaging 389 with stable latency.
David Schwartz, former CTO of Ripple and the primary architect of the XRP Ledger, shared the latest XRPL update, showing what the blockchain’s infrastructure has been up to since the recent attack and the emergency patches were rolled out.
He said on September 10 that his XRPL hub ran into two small incidents over the past two days, where peer counts dropped, and things got a bit laggy.
His investigation pointed to wider network troubles rather than anything specific to the XRP Ledger. According to Schwartz, even at the worst points, latency only went up by less than 20%, and about 80% of peer connections were fine.
July Attack Targeted XRPL’s Networking Layer
Schwartz’s comments are notable because XRPL experienced an attack on July 30.
The XRP Ledger Foundation later revealed in its vulnerability report that attackers overwhelmed the peer-to-peer network with a flood of fake validator manifests. That surge knocked out connections across the network and left some nodes cut off from most of their peers within minutes.
Importantly, the underlying ledger neither halted nor forked as the remaining UNL validators kept reaching consensus during the incident, and no funds, private keys, or ledger integrity were lost.
It did, however, prompt an emergency patch that put limits on how validator manifests spread throughout the network, including protections to stop nodes from burning through too much memory and processing power when dealing with untrusted manifests.
Schwartz’s Latest Data
Schwartz’s hub was averaging around 401 peer connections between August 25 and September 8, with a max of 423 connections.
On September 10, he also shared new data, showing that the numbers are similar to what they were recently. The number of peer connections ranged between 349 and 427, with an average of roughly 389. Also, the median latency was approximately 169 milliseconds, while the 90th percentile latency (basically the slowest connections) was 416 milliseconds on average.
While there’s a minor peer count drop compared to previous data, those numbers suggest the hub is running pretty much normally, and it isn’t showing the kind of widespread instability we saw during the July manifest flood.
Related: David Schwartz Says XRP Ledger Stayed Online During a Network-Wide Attack
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