Two suspects from the 3.3.0 slowdown investigation had no signal. Both were already computing the numbers and throwing them away, so this exposes them rather than adding measurement. Per-sweep heap trim. The trim runs after every cache sweep, and its cost scales with resident heap, so it is the leading explanation for a node with a populated database syncing slower than a fresh one. The report already carried duration, fault deltas and reclaimed pages, but the whole measurement sat behind a debug-journal check, so an ordinary node measured nothing, and the call site discarded the result. The measurement now always runs and only the log line stays gated. Records trim duration, minor faults and reclaimed kilobytes. Measured cost of the always-on path is about six microseconds per sweep against a trim costing milliseconds, at a cadence of ten to a hundred and twenty seconds. Honest limit, stated in the runbook: the fault delta spans only the trim call, so it shows the trim itself faulting but not the faults that follow as caches refill. The duration is the signal to correlate against sweep-job queueing. Rotation writes. Rotation copies archive-served reads forward and re-stores nodes missing from both backends, both of which compete with sync I/O and only happen on a populated online_delete database. The copy-forward count existed but was reset by the rotation's own log line, so a metric reading it would drop to zero on every swap; a never-reset total sits beside it now. The re-store count was not measured at all. Rotation duration is deliberately not recorded: the health throttle sleeps at eight points inside the sequence and dominates exactly when the node is unhealthy, so the number would conflate work with waiting. Nothing added for the other two suspects. Get-object serving is already covered by the handler label, the lookup histogram and the deferred and saturation gauges; peer churn by the disconnect-reason counter. Also replaces nine per-file cspell ignores with one ignoreRegExpList entry for the telemetry macro names, and picks up the levelization baseline for the consensus span-name test. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The XRP Ledger
The XRP Ledger is a decentralized cryptographic ledger powered by a network of peer-to-peer nodes. The XRP Ledger uses a novel Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus algorithm to settle and record transactions in a secure distributed database without a central operator.
XRP
XRP is a public, counterparty-free crypto-asset native to the XRP Ledger, and is designed as a gas token for network services and to bridge different currencies. XRP is traded on the open-market and is available for anyone to access. The XRP Ledger was created in 2012 with a finite supply of 100 billion units of XRP.
xrpld
The server software that powers the XRP Ledger is called xrpld and is available in this repository under the permissive ISC open-source license. The xrpld server software is written primarily in C++ and runs on a variety of platforms. The xrpld server software can run in several modes depending on its configuration.
If you are interested in running an API Server (including a Full History Server), take a look at Clio. (xrpld Reporting Mode has been replaced by Clio.)
Build from Source
- Read the build instructions in
BUILD.md - If you encounter any issues, please open an issue
Key Features of the XRP Ledger
- Censorship-Resistant Transaction Processing: No single party decides which transactions succeed or fail, and no one can "roll back" a transaction after it completes. As long as those who choose to participate in the network keep it healthy, they can settle transactions in seconds.
- Fast, Efficient Consensus Algorithm: The XRP Ledger's consensus algorithm settles transactions in 4 to 5 seconds, processing at a throughput of up to 1500 transactions per second. These properties put XRP at least an order of magnitude ahead of other top digital assets.
- Finite XRP Supply: When the XRP Ledger began, 100 billion XRP were created, and no more XRP will ever be created. The available supply of XRP decreases slowly over time as small amounts are destroyed to pay transaction fees.
- Responsible Software Governance: A team of full-time developers at Ripple & other organizations maintain and continually improve the XRP Ledger's underlying software with contributions from the open-source community. Ripple acts as a steward for the technology and an advocate for its interests.
- Secure, Adaptable Cryptography: The XRP Ledger relies on industry standard digital signature systems like ECDSA (the same scheme used by Bitcoin) but also supports modern, efficient algorithms like Ed25519. The extensible nature of the XRP Ledger's software makes it possible to add and disable algorithms as the state of the art in cryptography advances.
- Modern Features: Features like Escrow, Checks, and Payment Channels support financial applications atop of the XRP Ledger. This toolbox of advanced features comes with safety features like a process for amending the network and separate checks against invariant constraints.
- On-Ledger Decentralized Exchange: In addition to all the features that make XRP useful on its own, the XRP Ledger also has a fully-functional accounting system for tracking and trading obligations denominated in any way users want, and an exchange built into the protocol. The XRP Ledger can settle long, cross-currency payment paths and exchanges of multiple currencies in atomic transactions, bridging gaps of trust with XRP.
Source Code
Here are some good places to start learning the source code:
- Read the markdown files in the source tree:
src/xrpld/**/*.md. - Read the levelization document to get an idea of the internal dependency graph.
- In the big picture, the
mainfunction constructs anApplicationImpobject, which implements theApplicationvirtual interface. Almost every component in the application takes anApplication¶meter in its constructor, typically namedappand stored as a member variableapp_. This allows most components to depend on any other component.
Repository Contents
| Folder | Contents |
|---|---|
./bin |
Scripts and data files for XRPL developers. |
./Builds |
Platform-specific guides for building xrpld. |
./docs |
Source documentation files and doxygen config. |
./cfg |
Example configuration files. |
./src |
Source code. |
Some of the directories under src are external repositories included using
git-subtree. See those directories' README files for more details.