I am assuming you are not storing the entire blockchain now that we have DB,but maybe that is incorrect?
Almost all NXT functions only need the most recent 1440 blocks, so if each machine kept those 1440 blocks locally, they can purge them after that. blockchain FIFO.
If checkpoint files are a bad idea, I can live with that. Is blockchain FIFO a bad idea too?
Of course I store the whole blockchain, this is what the db contains.
You seem to be talking about blockchain trimming or pruning. This is in the plans, but not that soon.
Downloading the whole db will take longer than just the blockchain.
I am sorry about not knowing the obvious, still pretty new to crypto, past 10 weeks have been a steep learning curve.
It sounds like you dont have anything against blockchain FIFO. If it is in a DB, I thought it would just be a matter of a single DB call to delete all entries older than fifosize. this is not critical now, but I need to know about how long it will take to get a solution to the HDD storage problem that will hit us when we get to 1000TPS. Many nodes will want to just be able to be current, but not need to provide the entire blockchain to the peers. Just a parameter in web.xml to control fifo size. Anyway just planning for how we get from here to 1000TPS.
It sounds like there is no convenient "state of entire NXT network", so any checkpointing will be a lot of work. Not a problem now either, but after a few months of 1000TPS, no node with less than 1mbps will ever be able to catch up. Again, just planning for future growth.
James