Users notice performance through the lens of RPC. If endpoints choke, everything upstream looks broken, even when consensus is healthy. Treat infrastructure as product, with defined objectives and budgets.
Start with a clear topology. Place stateless RPC nodes behind anycast or smart load balancers, and route heavy queries to dedicated indexers. Separate write traffic from archival reads so neither starves the other.
Capacity planning needs real data. Measure requests per second by method, p95 latency, and error mix. Watch connection churn and queue depths. Forecast peak events and set automated scaling rules that activate early, not at the cliff.
Resilience comes from diversity. Run multiple client implementations if available, spread across providers and regions, and test failover constantly. Warm standbys are cheap compared to unplanned downtime and angry users.
Caching is your friend and your liability. Cache nonces and account states with short expiries to cut load, but never let stale data drive transaction failures. Invalidate aggressively on writes and expose cache headers to clients.
Backpressure protects the network. Rate limit by key and method, reject abusive patterns, and return clear errors. Offer paid tiers with higher limits for partners whose workloads benefit the ecosystem.
Observability must span layers. Link logs from balancers, RPCs, executors, and databases. When a spike hits, you want a coherent story, not a pile of isolated charts. Alerts should be symptom focused and action linked.
Data integrity matters. Snapshots and checksums catch silent data drift. Archival nodes should verify historical ranges before serving them to analysts or indexers that calculate sensitive metrics such as realized volatility.
Security is part of reliability. Isolate admin planes, rotate credentials, and require strong auth for private endpoints. Test for request smuggling and malformed payloads that can crash processes.
Cost control keeps the lights on. Track cost per million calls and per successful write. Optimize hot paths and defer cold history to cheaper storage. When cost spikes, investigate waste before buying more hardware.
As traffic grows, align spend with value. Charge premium for heavy methods, discount efficient patterns, and encourage contracts that use resources responsibly. If fees are settled in $TREE , publish clear pricing to remove surprises. Treasury programs can subsidize public goods RPC that onboard new users to $TREE. Partners can co fund regional edge caches with $TREE rewards when latency targets are met. Follow @Treehouse Official and tag #Treehouse when you publish benchmarks so the community can learn together.
