Sharp Edges

Understanding some of the edge cases with Old Faithful that can cause pain if you're not careful

Early Epochs

Protobuf Decoding

Sometime around epoch 157 the solana-validator warehousing process changed from bincode to protobuf.

Because this was not an on-chain feature activation and only an internal change, there is no discreet slot boundary where you can expect this transition to occur. It instead relies on when the warehousing process was upgraded to the version that switched to protocol buffers.

The OF1 files have this transition at epoch 157 but this can/will be different for other warehousing systems.

No Transaction Metadata

Some early epochs contain transactions without these transactions were warehoused by the validator without metadata and thus do not have any associated with them in the Old Faithful archives.

You should not see this occur on epochs above 157.