Hi all, I would like to share the team’s current thinking on the topic of increasing canister smart contract memory. This is a topic we know is important to the community and some people have been reaching out asking for the current status.With this update, we want to manage everyone’s expectations around the timeline of further increasing canister smart contract memory.
As we had discussed in our rollout plan when the original proposal had been shared with you, we were going to start with bumping the limit for stable memory to 8GB and keep growing it as the system stabilizes. Based on the experience we have gathered running the production system since then, we have come to the conclusion that further increasing the limit for stable memory now (e.g. up to the subnet memory limit) provides marginal benefits to canisters while it opens up the opportunity for extra risks given some limitations of the current system.
More specifically:
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Increasing the available stable memory of canisters can easily backfire if developers are not careful handling access to their bigger stable memory efficiently. A limit that is quite easy to hit is the instructions limit on canister upgrades (that is if you don’t manually store all data you need directly to stable memory, a task that is not trivial). Some of this will be alleviated by the upcoming DTS feature.
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The stable memory api is still unsatisfactory as it requires copying data to and from wasm heap and can easily become quite expensive cycles-wise if large chunks of memory need to be moved around. Future work includes adding support for wasm64 and multiple memories on the IC and these should greatly help improve the story around handling of stable memory, including improving the performance of stable memory calls. We believe that these are important to do before we further increase the size of stable memory.
We believe that the work outlined above is important to be done before we attempt to further increase the available size of stable memory in order to provide developers with a safe and efficient platform to build on. As usual, we will keep the community posted on the progress of these necessary features, so please stay tuned.