Blockchain Devblog — Newest Features on the Internet Computer: Memory increased in canisters

Cosmicrafts
2 min readOct 30, 2021

Hello, I’m PK34 and i will be writing about blockhain and a little bit about everything. Hope you like my first entry. ❤

At first the canisters were limited to 4GB of storage. To improve this, on September 1st, 2021, an increase up to 300GB was approved by the community via NNS, the limit that it had in each subnet.

The limit is in the amount of Bits that can be used with wasm, which with only 32 limits the amount of data saved to the 4GB mentioned. It should be noted that another 4 could be stored but they were lost when updating the canister, since only 4GB were in persistent format.

To this day, the update has been uploaded and deployed to increase up to 8GB of permanent storage per canister, which marks the first step on the road to supporting the 300GB suggested in this proposal.

To achieve this it is required that the 64 Bit API can be used, which is under development but not yet possible within orthogonal persistence. As it was with the other 4GB in the previous version, when the canisters are updated, part of the information is eliminated and only what is explicitly marked as persistent is stored.

Using 64 Bits, not only 300GB could be used, but it would allow up to 16 Exabytes (16,000,000 Terabytes), but the limit of 300GB would currently be what is available within each subnet, if this capacity were to increase, the code would allow it to be taken without additional modifications.

This may work for immutable canisters at the moment, where it is not required to update the code at any time, but the goal is that the information can be maintained even when the canister is updated with self improvements.

At the moment we can expect to have improvements in the DAPPS in development and those that are being maintained and with future changes to be able to have quite robust applications in terms of storage, in addition to opening doors to applications such as YouTube or Netflix directly integrated into the Internet Computer!

Sources:

https://forum.dfinity.org/t/increased-canister-smart-contract-memory/6148

https://forum.dfinity.org/t/increased-canister-smart-contract-memory/6148/37

--

--

Cosmicrafts

Dive into a futuristic real-time strategy game where you experience the thrill of intergalactic warfare and command your fleets in action-packed battlefields.