Bee v2.8.3 is now available. It includes security fixes, and all node operators should upgrade as soon as possible. It also lets operators pause redistribution without a restart, fixes a bug that could silently stop uploads, and makes reserve sampling much lighter on memory.
What Is Changing
As announced on October 8th, Bee v2.8.3 includes security fixes. Swarm Foundation held back the details until the release was available, and they are described below. Alongside them, the release gives full-node operators more control over redistribution, fixes a bug that could quietly stop a node from uploading, and makes nodes lighter on memory and more compatible with common RPC providers.
The upgrade is non-disruptive. It includes no breaking p2p protocol changes and needs no manual migration. A few things are worth knowing before you upgrade:
- Full nodes run a one-time reserve check on their first start, which can make that start take longer. See A Healthier Reserve below.
- Operators who set
gas-limit-fallbackthemselves should review it. See Other Operator Improvements below. - Developers who use ACT with
POST /chunksorPOST /socshould read API & Developer Changes below. - Operators with monitoring alerts on Bee’s logs should check the Monitoring and Alerts section below.
The network’s minimum supported version remains v2.8.0.
Security Fixes
Malformed content can no longer stall downloads.
Specially crafted content could make a download request run indefinitely, keeping a CPU core busy until the node was restarted, and repeated requests could tie up more of the node.
Any node type could be affected through the endpoints that read files, such as /bytes and /bzz.
Nodes that fetch content for untrusted users, such as public gateways or apps that pass user-supplied references to Bee, were the most exposed.
Bee now checks a file’s structure as it reads it and stops with an error when the content is malformed.
A single peer can no longer exhaust a full node’s incoming streams.
Full nodes now limit how many pull-sync streams one peer can keep open at the same time: 128 for syncing and 4 for cursor requests.
Previously, a faulty or malicious peer could hold open enough idle streams to use up the node’s capacity for incoming streams, after which the node stopped accepting streams from other peers as well.
A peer that goes over the limit is now disconnected, and the node logs peer exceeded concurrent stream limit, disconnecting.
Light and ultra-light nodes do not serve pull-sync and were not affected.
Pause Redistribution Without Restarting
Full-node operators can now switch redistribution participation off and back on while the node is running. Until now, the only way to opt out was to change the node’s configuration and restart it, and restarting a node after it had committed to a round but before it revealed could get its stake frozen.
When participation is paused, the node stops entering new rounds but finishes any round it is already part of.
Before taking a node down for maintenance, check GET /redistributionstate: it is safe to stop the node when hasCommittedThisRound is false, or once hasRevealedThisRound is true.
To pause participation:
curl -X PATCH http://localhost:1633/redistributionstate \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"enabled": false}'
Send {"enabled": true} to resume.
The setting is not saved across restarts: participation switches back on whenever the node restarts.
Uploads No Longer Stall Silently
Bee v2.8.3 fixes a bug where a single invalid chunk could stop a node from uploading anything to the network, without logging an error. The stall survived restarts, so an affected node could stay stuck for hours.
After upgrading, the invalid chunk is dropped and any pending uploads resume on their own. No manual action is needed.
A Healthier Reserve
Nodes now check more carefully that the chunks they receive from peers are valid, so invalid chunks are no longer stored in a node’s reserve.
Any invalid chunks that earlier versions already stored are cleaned up automatically, once, the first time the node starts on v2.8.3.
verifying non-cac reserve chunks when the check starts and removed rogue reserve chunks when it is done.
When a full node’s neighborhood is selected in a redistribution round, the node samples its reserve, which can mean working through millions of chunks. Bee v2.8.3 makes this much lighter: in testing, the memory used during a sampling round fell by more than half. The result of the sampling is unchanged.
Sampling also skips chunks from soon-to-expire postage batches earlier, which makes it faster on nodes that hold many of them. If a node cannot read its list of postage batches, it now skips that round’s sample instead of risking one that disagrees with its neighborhood.
Postage Sync with More RPC Providers
Some RPC providers limit how many blocks a single request can cover. Nethermind, for example, allows up to 1,000 blocks by default, while Bee could ask for up to 5,000 at a time. A node using such a provider could fall behind on postage data and eventually shut itself down.
Bee now asks for 1,000 blocks at a time by default, so it works with these providers out of the box, and the value is configurable. Bee also now waits between retries when an RPC call fails, which eases the load on your RPC endpoint. The postage snapshot bundled with Bee is refreshed as well, so a new node has fewer blocks of postage history to catch up on.
The smaller default means a catching-up node makes more RPC calls than before.
If your provider allows wider block ranges, you can raise the value, for example in bee.yaml:
postage-sync-block-range: 5000
The equivalent flag is --postage-sync-block-range and the environment variable is BEE_POSTAGE_SYNC_BLOCK_RANGE.
Other Operator Improvements
- Faster peer discovery and sync. Nodes now share peer information more efficiently, and neighborhoods settle more quickly after nodes join or restart. Several bugs in how nodes introduce peers to each other are also fixed.
- More reliable AutoTLS. For operators running WSS with AutoTLS, certificate registration no longer hangs or fails against the default registration service, and a certificate that expired while the node was offline is now renewed on startup.
- SIMD hashing crash fixed. On Linux x86-64 nodes started with
--use-simd-hashing, heavy hashing load such as reserve sampling could crash the node and leave it restarting. This is now fixed. Nodes running without the flag were never affected. - Safer handling of damaged local data. A corrupted postage stamp record could cause a very large memory allocation when the node started, and a stored cheque missing its payout amount could crash a node with SWAP enabled. Bee now rejects both with a clear error. Neither could be triggered by peers or API clients.
- Updated gas limits for contract transactions. After a gas repricing on the Sepolia testnet, some contract calls cost more gas than Bee’s fixed limits allowed, so chequebook deployments and redistribution transactions could fail. Bee now estimates gas for chequebook and BZZ transfer transactions, redistribution transactions use at least 800,000 gas instead of 500,000, and the fallback used when gas estimation fails rises from 500,000 to 900,000.
- Clearer staking errors. Some stake deposits that the staking contract would reject, typically a small top-up after the storage price has risen, used to be sent to the chain anyway and fail with a generic error. Bee now checks every deposit against the contract’s rules first and, if it is too small, tells you the minimum required.
GET /stakealso now shows thisminimumDeposit. If Bee cannot read the price oracle,minimumDepositisnulland no deposit is sent.
gas-limit-fallback (or BEE_GAS_LIMIT_FALLBACK) in your configuration, your value still applies.
Remove it to use the new default, or raise it to 900000.
Monitoring and Alerts
If you monitor your node with Prometheus and Grafana:
- API metrics are back. The
bee_api_*metrics have been missing from/metricssince v2.2.0. API dashboard panels that have sat empty will populate again. - Connection metrics are split by transport.
bee_libp2p_created_connection_countandbee_libp2p_handled_connection_countnow show which transports your node’s connections use, such as WSS. Wrap existing queries insum(...)to keep a single total. - Pull-sync stream limit.
bee_pullsync_stream_limit_exceededcounts peers disconnected for opening too many pull-sync streams, andbee_libp2p_protocol_handler_call_countcounts incoming streams per protocol. - New metrics show whether redistribution participation is switched on (
bee_storageincentives_redistribution_enabled) and track peer discovery activity.
stream handler: handshake: handle failed log line is now a warning instead of an error, because it fired constantly on healthy nodes.
The log message for content that cannot be found now reads erasure coded content not found instead of swarmageddon has begun.
Alerts that match either of these should be updated.
API & Developer Changes
ACT is no longer supported on POST /chunks and POST /soc.
ACT never actually protected data uploaded through these endpoints.
ACT headers sent to them are now ignored, and uploads return a plain reference.
Use /bytes or /bzz for access-controlled uploads, where ACT is unchanged.
References created with ACT on earlier versions still resolve.
Other API changes:
- GSOC subscriptions can now choose which fields of each message they receive. The default is unchanged, so existing clients are unaffected.
- GSOC subscriptions no longer miss messages that arrive right after the connection opens.
- Slow GSOC subscribers now keep a backlog of up to 256 messages. When a client falls too far behind, the oldest messages are dropped.
- Range downloads with
Swarm-Lookahead-Buffer-Size: 0could return incomplete data. This is now fixed. The default download path was not affected. - Stewardship (
PUT /stewardship) now also restores the extra copies of root chunks that uploads with redundancy rely on, which it previously reported as restored without doing so. - Redistribution control and staking changes are described above.
Full Changelog
For the complete list of changes and all technical details, see the Bee v2.8.3 release notes on GitHub.
Need Help?
If you’re a node operator or developer with questions about upgrading or the new features, join the #node-operators channel on the Swarm Discord.
If your node is not yet on v2.8.3, upgrade now.
Discussions about Swarm can be found on Reddit.
All tech support and other channels have moved to Discord!
Please feel free to reach out via info@ethswarm.org
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