Configuring

Configuration file

Firedancer is configured via. a TOML file. Almost all options have a recommended default value that is set automatically by Firedancer and an operator needs only to specify values for options they wish to change. It is not recommended to edit the default.toml file directly as it is compiled into the binary.

MIGRATING

The Solana labs validator is configured with command line options like --identity identity.json --rpc-port 8899. When migrating your scripts, these command line options will need to move to the corresponding configuration option in the TOML file.

You can see all of the available options and their defaults by looking at the default.toml file. An example TOML file overriding select options needed for a new validator might look like:

# /home/firedancer/config.toml
user = "firedancer"
[gossip]
    entrypoints = [
      "10.0.0.2:8001"
    ]
[rpc]
    port = 9099
[consensus]
    identity_path = "/home/firedancer/validator-keypair.json"
    vote_account_path = "/home/firedancer/vote-keypair.json"

Once your configuration file is specified you can use it by either setting the FIREDANCER_CONFIG_TOML environment variable, or by passing it to your command with the --config option.

NOTE

The same configuration file must be supplied to all commands, especially when configuring and later running the validator. Using a different file for different commands may cause them to fail.

Logging

By default Firedancer will maintain two logs. One permanent log which is written to a file, and an ephemeral log for fast visual inspection which is written to stderr.

Layout

One way that Firedancer is fast is that it pins a dedicated thread to each CPU core on the system. Each thread can do one specific kind of work, for example, a verify tile can verify the signatures of incoming transactions. Tiles are connected together in a graph to form an efficient pipeline for processing transactions.

WARNING

Each tile needs a dedicated CPU core and it will be saturated at 100% utilization The Solana Labs process will run on the remaining cores, and you must leave at least a few cores unpinned so that it is not starved.

The configuration file has options for how many of each kind of tile should be started.

[layout]
    affinity = "0-14"
    net_tile_count = 4
    verify_tile_count = 4
    bank_tile_count = 4

By default Firedancer has set the count of each tile so that the system can handle transactions from a 25GiB NIC at line rate. Except for the warning noted above, it is suggested to run as many tiles as possible so that the Solana network can run faster.

Ledger

By default, Firedancer stores the ledger in a scratch directory, defined in the ledger section in the configuration TOML. The default path is defined as /home/{user}/.firedancer/{name}/ledger where name and user gets replaced by what is in the configuration file. Assuming you have name = fd1 (which is the default) and user = firedancer in the TOML file, this resolves to /home/firedancer/.firedancer/fd1/ledger. You can specify a custom path for the ledger by setting ledger.path:

[ledger]
    path = "/data/ledger"