I’ve been watching the same thing since the new rules went into effect on Saturday. I think it could be a symptom of a bigger issue though.
The waiting pool is no longer being shuffled. At all. Previously – at the beginning of each epoch the nodes in the waiting pool were shuffled. Later in that same epoch, 32 randomly selected nodes from random, non-sequential positions were pulled into the 8 shard pending lists. A node’s position in the waiting list did not factor into when a node moved to a pending list. A node in position 1 was just as likely to enter a shard’s pending list as the node in the very last position or any random position between.
If you searched for your node(s) by the BLS mining key each epoch, you would see the position in the waiting list change every epoch.
However now the waiting pool appears to no longer be shuffled. A node will now stay in the same position relative to the nodes immediately before and after it in the list. And nodes are now pulled only from the top of the list, not from random, non-sequential positions.
Here are the last five nodes in the waiting pool of Epoch 3479.
Here are the same five nodes in the waiting pool of Epoch 3480. Same order, just moved up a few positions.
Here are five nodes from the middle of the waiting pool in Epoch 3479.
And here are the same five nodes in the waiting pool of Epoch 3480. Again – same order, just moved up 50 positions.
Not shuffled. Moved up 50 index positions. And not shuffled.
Finally here are the five nodes at the top of the waiting list for Epoch 3479.
And here are the same nodes, after nodes are assigned to the 8 shard pending lists in Epoch 3480.
Each of those 5 nodes has moved to a shard pending list in Epoch 3480. Clearly no longer “SELECTED AT RANDOM” as the list header states.
One of my nodes has had the misfortune to be in the very last index position when the new rules went into effect. It has remained at the back of the list since this weekend. Based on the above observations, it could only enter the waiting pool committee once 99.5% of all nodes are already in the waiting pool.
As for your observation – it does appear nodes exiting committee are returned to the top of the list of nodes in the waiting pool where they immediately move back into the pending pool. Nodes being added to each shard’s pending list seem to be a mixture of nodes just released from committee AND nodes from the waiting list.
And to further complicate things, I think the new unstaking flow is broken. Before the weekend update, it was easy to see the new unstaking flow in action for new Unstaking Requests. Unstaking Requests were fulfilled about 2-3 hours after being submitted. Here 9 nodes submit Unstaking Requests which are fulfilled about 2.5 hours later.
However now we can see that Unstaking Requests are not being fulfilled in such a timely or orderly manner.
The 7 requests appear to be eventually fulfilled, albeit at random intervals not commiserate with submission requests. This also assumes that all these Unstaked transactions correlate to the shown Unstaking Requests and not any of the ~45 v.1 Unstaking Requests still waiting for committee selection to unstake.
It does appear something well beyond “longer time in the pending pool” has significantly altered the way candidate Nodes flow in the waiting pool, pending pool and even affects new v.2 Unstaking Requests.
