services/horizon: change configuration of SKIP_TXMETA in puppet to true

[mollykarcher]

What problem does your feature solve?

We announced back in January that we would be sunsetting txmeta from Horizon, in anticipation of a potential for a large increase in data size following the launch of Soroban. The ecosystem alternative should they need access to txmeta is to get it from RPC's getTransactions endpoint, and this has been available since 21.3.0 (~mid June).

What would you like to see?

Change the default for the SKIP_TXMETA flag to true, so that txmeta is no longer returned by Horizon by default.

What alternatives are there?

• Leave the default as false and simply set the config to true on SDF's Horizon deployment. Even though this isn't what we had originally planned, I think that given we haven't seen the explosion in data size due to Soroban that was anticipated, this might be the better option to go with for now, given it's less disruptive overall. And it still de-risks us from our deployment's perspective, since we don't need to store/service it on ours. Open to thoughts here.

[mollykarcher]

Note that we decided on the "alternative approach" described in the description. Changed the title of ticket to match

[sreuland]

@mollykarcher , any preference on rollout of these changes for the 3 horizon deployments, i.e. futurenet first, testnet second, pubnet third.

With the rollout commencing right after or before the P22 is voted?

[mollykarcher]

Good question. I think coordinating it with the p22 vote time on pubnet makes sense. Futurnet we could do whenever, now even.

For testnet, I actually might make an argument that it'd be worth it to do it sooner than the p22 vote and instead coordinate it with our announcement of RC builds. My reasoning for this is that this is when people would be updating to new builds and reacting to other breaking changes anyway, and it would actually give them more time to react before the pubnet vote, in case they weren't aware it was happening. @JakeUrban so you have an opinion?

Whatever we decide we should keep @johncanneto in the loop, as I know he was planning some discord announcements around this.

[JakeUrban]

I agree @mollykarcher, I don't see a strong reason to delay the update of the SKIP_TXMETA flag on our testnet deployment to the p22 vote. Bundling it with the rollout of our blog post & upgrade guide makes sense. @briwylde08 we'll want to update our guide to note that txmeta is being removed from SDF horizon instances.

[sreuland]

Ok, will start with futurenet now - https://github.com/stellar/puppet-v4/pull/4117

@johncanneto , if any comms are preferred before changing futurenet horizon , let me know, won't merge this until I get confirm from you. After this is updated, we should keep an eye on any discord dev channels for possibly related disruption.

in background, I'll stage draft pr's for testnet and pubnet, those can be merged later when their pre-conditions are met.

[sreuland]

The horizon testnet update for enabling SKIP_TXMETA is staged - https://github.com/stellar/puppet-v4/pull/4119

@johncanneto , let me know what preconditions need to be met before we apply to hosted horizon testnet, if it's a specific RC release for core or rpc, or other p22 preparations, thanks!

[sreuland]

SKIP_TXMETA=true has been deployed onto horizon testnet - https://github.com/stellar/puppet-v4/pull/4119

will do horizon pubnet later when appropriate per the protocol 22 upgrade schedule.

[sreuland]

draft pr's are staged for updating prd horizon cluster configs for skip tx-meta, just need to merge these when ready:
https://github.com/stellar/puppet-v4/pull/4168
https://github.com/stellar/puppet-v4/pull/4169

[tamirms]

We will merge the PRs on Dec 5, 2024

[sreuland]

this has been fully merged to prod deployment, closing.