I’m the only one working on it and the workload is very uneven.
When HEN asks me for a new feature, the time it takes depends on the feature. Adding the ophash to the swaps took something like 2h, indexing the split contracts took 3 days and it’s not done yet.
When the chain is behaving properly there’s only 5-10 block rollbacks per week and they don’t always require reindexing everything or immediate intervention. Reindexing everything take around 1h of work. When the chain doesn’t behave, like last weekend with the granada issue, I had to fix the indexer up to 3x per hour for 48h. Without these manual fixes in the data, HEN is basically down (only serving stale data).
Maintenance is definitely what’s taking me most time, keeping it up-to-date, bugfixing, reindexing when a bad rollback happens on-chain. A weekly average of 1h/day seems like a reasonable guesstimate.
I keep server costs at the bare minimum because I’m not aiming at high availability and because it’s my money, so it costs me less than 100$ a month. The goal of hicdex never was to be HEN’s backend, and I don’t think it should be. HEN shouldn’t 100% rely on a single volunteer’s work, it’s dangerous and not only because of the indefinite downtime if I couldn’t take constant care of it, also because if I were malevolent I could manipulate everything from trade history to current prices of objkts, making people who don’t always check the details of their purchase transactions spend much more than the listed price or buy different things than they expected, or show counterfeit things on famous artists’ profiles, or ban people and pieces… well, total control over the data.
Discuss it here and then go to vote: H=N VOTE