Stellar Core 10.3.0

10.3.0 is a minor release with no changes to the Stellar protocol. With this release comes major improvements when nodes join the network — we’ve seen a speedup of up to 10x when applying buckets on our low end hardware.

Compatibility Warning: This version has some breaking changes (see below). If you're using Horizon you must use a version of Horizon that is > 0.17.4.

Stability Improvements

• Increased performance for database access via batched queries and commands.
• Added several improvements that enable better communication between peers.
• Fixed a crash when replaying history during catchup, which could be triggered by flaky connectivity to the network.
• Fixed a crash when merging buckets and running out of disk space.
• SCP: Updated nomination to remember previous round leaders which reduces the chances of timeouts and a longer consensus time.
• Windows: Fix random failures when adopting buckets
• Stop using memory for peers that are too slow by dropping them
• Added configuration value for straggling peers timeout (PEER_STRAGGLER_TIMEOUT).

New Features

• Peers referenced by name in the configuration file have their IP refreshed periodically to help with peer discovery during DNS updates.
• Added a configuration value to drop peers that are too slow.

Breaking changes

• Stellar Core now depends on PostgreSQL of > 9.5 (was 9.4)
• As part of our recent performance improvements, Stellar Core's database schema changed for certain kinds of ledger entries. For more details, see docs/db-schema.md for details. Any software uses core’s database directly (such as Horizon) must support schema version 9 or above.
• Old style CLI options will be deprecated in a post 11.X.X release. See docs/software/commands.md for the list of currently supported command line options.

Additional Details: https://github.com/stellar/stellar-core/projects/9