Prune State

The performance of a full node will degrade when the storage size reaches a high volume. We suggest that the fullnode always keep light storage by pruning the storage.

note

To prune a Geth node at least 200 GB of free disk space is recommended. This means pruning cannot be used to save a hard drive that has been completely filled. A good rule of thumb is to prune before the node fills ~80% of the available disk space.

The hardware is important, make sure the SSD meets: solid-state drive(SSD), 8k IOPS, 500 MB/S throughput, read latency < 1ms.

MPT Nodes

After migrating to MPT storage, nodes run with --morph-mpt and use standard MPT state storage. Use the standard prune command:

note

After switching to MPT storage, pruning is only supported after the node has synced at least 128 blocks. Do not attempt to prune immediately after migration.

1. Stop the node, including the consensus client (morphnode) and the execution client (geth).
2. Run the prune command:

   nohup geth snapshot prune-state --datadir "$GETH_DB_DIR" > prune.log &
   It will take several hours to finish.
3. Start the node once it is done.

zkTrie Nodes (legacy)

caution

This section only applies to nodes still running with zkTrie state storage before migrating to MPT. Once you switch to an MPT node, the zkTrie prune command is no longer supported. See the zkTrie -> MPT migration guide for details.

For nodes still running with zkTrie state storage, use the zkTrie-specific prune command:

1. Stop the node, including the consensus client (morphnode) and the execution client (geth).
2. Run the prune command:

   nohup geth snapshot prune-zk-state --datadir "$GETH_DB_DIR" > prune.log &
   It will take 5~7 hours to finish.
3. Start the node once it is done.