Verbaltech2 - BitShares Witness Report - Monthly Update

With the increase in activity on the BitSharesTalk.org forum, in Telegram and on the DEX itself, starting now I will provide regular updates, no fewer than once a month near the first of each month. I may provide additional reports as necessary to cover other activities. I will also mirror these reports on both steem and the BitSharesTalk forum.

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WOW! What a rally in BTS price this past weekend

- Status of Upgrades
I just completed the upgrade of all of my nodes in March, doubling their RAM capacity and deploying the memory savings feature @xeroc told us about during the testnet. Yet, I added a 5th node with 16GB of RAM to insure adequate capacity should this rally in activity continue or grow.

All of the VPS providers I utilize must accept payment in crypto. That rules out the biggest hosting services like AWS or Digital Ocean, although some D.O. resellers accept crypto. The difficulty now is finding companies that also offer the bigger RAM configurations. If the BTS price remains at these levels dedicated servers will be the next upgrade path.

I also believe it's important to have good geographical coverage, so I run nodes in France, Australia, Singapore, Germany and the Netherlands. I have had nodes in North America (both USA & Canada) in the past, however that is well covered by other witnesses. I found a provider in Romania, however that provider suggested to relocate the node to the Netherlands to improve the network performance. The move only resulted in a small reduction in ping time.

One thing I've noticed is that the Singapore and Australian nodes miss more blocks than those in Europe and North America. The network connectivity is significantly slower to nodes in that region of the world, with ping times between 180 and 350ms.

Here are some graphs of RAM, CPU and active connections used from the bts_tools monitoring software I use (thanks @wackou!). Only 3 nodes are shown as the one in Romania is being relocated and I haven't determined where I will place the 5th node:

France (16GB RAM, despite scale on graph)

Australia

Germany

Netherlands

Singapore

- Other Activities
I have also spent considerable time migrating a Wordpress website and associated forum to a VPS using an open source control panel called Webmin/Virtualmin. I prefer the leaner Nginx web server over Apache, which is how it is running now, however it's proving to be difficult under the Virtualmin control panel. I chose to use a control panel to simplify setup and management of email primarily, though there are many other conveniences and features as well. I also intend to use that platform to provide VPN services.

Once all this VPS work is complete I will begin writing a rudimentary scheduler in Python to deliver programming for a radio station. Once I'm reasonably comfortable in Python I will turn my attention to @xeroc's uptick to create a few utilities to gather information from the BitShares blockchain and to help @wackou improve bts_tools.

Your vote for witness

Verbaltech2!

is greatly appreciated! Thanks for your time and attention