I'm assuming he meant a user-friendly clicky GUI thingy.
Not sure why that feat is removed in the first place?
No idea.
BTW, we should really switch from BerkeleyDB to LevelDB... These client start-up times are driving me crazy.
Why you think it is up to database? Bitcoin was using BerkeleyDB for years and even though blockchain size was in gigabytes and number of
transactions far exceeded any other cryptocoin I never experienced as long startups as with YACoin. Most LTC and NVC "clones" start much
faster than YACoin as well. Is there some kind of tool that could monitor what exactly is YACoin doing for those 6+ minutes at it's startup?
I'm not certain it's the DB, but I inserted debug statements into the loading code and most of the time was spent loading the blockchain into memory. IMHO the main reason is the number of blocks (we will be on par with BTC pretty soon, and BTC switched to LevelDB AGES ago). Dunno about the other coins though. Also the loading algorithms might be heavily outdated and thus slow. That said, this needs further investigation and a fix ASAP.
Some code references:
*
https://github.com/yacoin/yacoin/blob/master/src/init.cpp#L671 (the comment in particular)
*
https://github.com/yacoin/yacoin/blob/master/src/db.cpp#L824 (IIRC the slowest part of the code)
*
https://github.com/yacoin/yacoin/blob/master/src/db.cpp#L642 (some heavy-weight sanity checking, IIRC the second slowest part)
*
https://github.com/yacoin/yacoin/blob/master/src/db.cpp#L884 (maybe [but I'm really just guessing] this might be also a fairly slow operation, especially as the number of coin stakes will grow)
Thanks!
As a sidenote, I have YAC, XPM and BTC clients running on my computer, each with maxconnections=32 in .conf file. After 12 hours or so, the
situation with number of nodes connected is usualy something like listed bellow.
YACoin - 32 connections
Bitcoin - 24 connections
Primecoin - 12 connections
No idea how to properly interpret that data though. One of the reasons why YACoin gets so much more connections could be the lack of UPnP
with Coin Control versions (which I solved using
PortMapper), e.g. nodes that connect to network after my node went online need to connect
to other nodes to complete syncing but due to Coin Control nodes not being able to accept connections it is my node that ends up "slammed".
FYI, I'm located at Eastern Europe.
8 connections are plenty if you're not a pool or a miner. I once tweaked the node on my block explorer server to have as much connections as possible (it was hovering around 130 IIRC), but I saw no actual benefit, so I closed the port in firewall and allowed only outbound connection (thus reducing the chance on potential attackers).
Also, the code is smart enough to connect to different subnets to minimize the risk of connecting to "bad" nodes (eg. someone could spam your peer list with nodes that he controls - and they will usually fall into the same network subnet). So you might just happen to be one of only a few nodes in that particular network "area".
YACoin has some of the best developer support around despite its low price.