- Ripple CTO investigates mysterious XRPL hub latency spike at midnight.
- David Schwartz launches independent XRPL server with powerful specifications.
- XRP Ledger amendments gain majority support and near activation phase.
Ripple’s Chief Technology Officer, David Schwartz, has drawn attention to unusual behavior recorded by his newly established XRPL hub. The hub was designed to be a production service to assist validators, hubs, and servers, and collect data about network activity. Schwartz clarified that it was made to be stable and reliable, and no disruptive testing was planned except in extraordinary cases.
The anomaly was detected through routine surveillance when Schwartz noted an anomalous latency surge starting at 1:59 a.m. PDT. The outage took about 15 minutes and resulted in poorer-than-usual performance on some connections, casting doubt on the hub’s operating environment.
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Latency Spike Raises Network Concerns
According to Schwartz, the pattern did not resemble an internal hub issue, since such a fault would likely cause uniform latency increases across all connections. Instead, the event was in isolation as only three of the 343 peer connections went down at the time. Traffic also fell a little, but this was explained by the disconnections and not a general failure.
He further stated that his data is sparse at present, and there is only one day of complete instrumentation. This makes it hard to tell whether the incident was a fluke, a daily recurring incident, or a random occurrence. Schwartz cited network congestion as the most probable cause, citing a bandwidth hiccup as the reason.
Improvement of the hub’s monitoring systems is already in progress. Schwartz affirmed the intentions to introduce Alloy and Grafana tools that would allow more detailed insight into performance and record valuable information in the event of any subsequent incidents.
Independent Server Boosts Connectivity
In addition to the hub, Schwartz has deployed a powerful XRPL server at a New York data center. The server is also synchronized well and adds extra connectivity, although it still needs to be hardened further before assuming critical tasks.
The hardware configuration is focused on high loads, with an AMD 9950X processor, 256 GB RAM, a 10 Gbps unmetered connection, and multiple terabytes of NVMe and SSD disk space. According to Schwartz, this project is purely personal, operated by him on Ubuntu, and has nothing to do with Ripple as a company.
He also explained that the server is a production-grade, high-uptime machine designed to handle long-term loads, and some of its capacity may be shared with other members of the XRPL community in the future.
Amendments Near Activation
At the same time, the XRP Ledger is advancing with three proposed amendments. Identified as fixAMMv1_3, fixEnforceNFTokenTrustlineV2, and fixPayChanCancelAfter, they have gained majority support and entered a 14-day countdown. If consensus is maintained, they will be activated as scheduled.
The midnight latency spike has pushed Schwartz to strengthen monitoring systems and expand XRPL infrastructure with an independent server. These efforts, combined with the progress of new amendments, reflect ongoing steps to improve stability and resilience across the network.
