FAQ

Answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs) about Lily.


Setup

Do I need Lotus to run Lily?

No. Lily does not need a separate Lotus node running since Lily itself is an abstraction over Lotus.

However, Lily can use a datastore created by Lotus.

Do I need to use TimescaleDB with Lily?

A database instance is not required to use Lily. You can simply have a Lily node running and then run a walk job over it with CSVs as a Storage mechanism. These CSVs can then be loaded onto the database of your choosing.

How much storage should I allocate for my database?

Around 4TB should be sufficient for mainnet data with a data retention policy of 3 months.

How do I configure Lily?

You can configure Lily with the config.toml file.

Where do I get the config.toml file?

Lily creates a config.toml file for you upon lily init if no configuration file is provided to the --config option.

Lotus also provides a default config.toml file with the handy lotus config default command. You can then redirect this into a file.

Why didn’t my config changes take effect?

You’ll need to restart the Lily daemon.


Jobs

How should I distribute tasks across jobs?

Tasks should be grouped based on the actors they process for optimal cache utilization.

How can I backfill incomplete data?

You can run the find job and then an adhoc fill job to backfill missing tasks at some specified range of epochs. This can also be run as a cron job.

How can I tell if Lily correctly exported to the database?

You can use gap find to search for gaps in the database. You can also run the gap find function independent of Lily with SQL.

Why are my tasks failing?

You can run gap find over the visor_processing_reports table.

All jobs that run tasks, [walk, watch, fill], will write the results of the tasks to visor_processing_reports.

Why is my job failing?

Check lily job list to see the reason for job failure.

Can a job be successful even when tasks fail?

Yes. A job runs a set of tasks and tasks can fail while the job is successful.


Syncing

Do I need to let Lily sync until the current epoch?

Yes. If you run jobs before Lily completely syncs, there will be unexpected behavior.

How can I make sure that Lily finishes syncing?

lily sync wait && lily ...

What’s a good way to check that my repo has all of the heights I need for a walk?

lily job run --tasks=actor_states,consensus,messages walk --from <min_height> --to <max_height>

Why do tasks in my job fail?

This can be for multiple reasons. But the most common ones are:

  • your Lily node is not fully synced
  • the snapshot you used to initialize Lily does not have the state of either your minimum or maximum epoch height