Commit 4dc08f820258ac6c62071c7070c175e48352f8b3 introduced support for
deterministic shards, which makes the sharding functionality provided
by rippled more useful.
After merging, several opportunities for further improvements to the
deterministic sharding implementation were identified and a significant
increase int memory usage during shard finalization was detected.
Because of these issues, the commit is being reverted and the feature is
being rolled back. It will be reintroduced in a future release.
This commit, if merged, adds support to allow multiple indepedent nodes to
produce a binary identical shard for a given range of ledgers. The advantage
is that servers can use content-addressable storage, and can more efficiently
retrieve shards by downloading from multiple peers at once and then verifying
the integrity of a shard by cross-checking its checksum with the checksum
other servers report.
