## Proposed Changes
Clone the proposer pubkeys during backfill signature verification to reduce the time that the pubkey cache lock is held for. Cloning such a small number of pubkeys has negligible impact on the total running time, but greatly reduces lock contention.
On a Ryzen 5950X, the setup step seems to take around 180us regardless of whether the key is cloned or not, while the verification takes 7ms. When Lighthouse is limited to 10% of one core using `sudo cpulimit --pid <pid> --limit 10` the total time jumps up to 800ms, but the setup step remains only 250us. This means that under heavy load this PR could cut the time the lock is held for from 800ms to 250us, which is a huge saving of 99.97%!
## Issue Addressed
This PR addresses an issue found by @YorickDowne during testing of v2.0.0-rc.0.
Due to a lack of atomic database writes on checkpoint sync start-up, it was possible for the database to get into an inconsistent state from which it couldn't recover without `--purge-db`. The core of the issue was that the store's anchor info was being stored _before_ the `PersistedBeaconChain`. If a crash occured so that anchor info was stored but _not_ the `PersistedBeaconChain`, then on restart Lighthouse would think the database was unitialized and attempt to compare-and-swap a `None` value, but would actually find the stale info from the previous run.
## Proposed Changes
The issue is fixed by writing the anchor info, the split point, and the `PersistedBeaconChain` atomically on start-up. Some type-hinting ugliness was required, which could possibly be cleaned up in future refactors.
## Issue Addressed
Closes#1891Closes#1784
## Proposed Changes
Implement checkpoint sync for Lighthouse, enabling it to start from a weak subjectivity checkpoint.
## Additional Info
- [x] Return unavailable status for out-of-range blocks requested by peers (#2561)
- [x] Implement sync daemon for fetching historical blocks (#2561)
- [x] Verify chain hashes (either in `historical_blocks.rs` or the calling module)
- [x] Consistency check for initial block + state
- [x] Fetch the initial state and block from a beacon node HTTP endpoint
- [x] Don't crash fetching beacon states by slot from the API
- [x] Background service for state reconstruction, triggered by CLI flag or API call.
Considered out of scope for this PR:
- Drop the requirement to provide the `--checkpoint-block` (this would require some pretty heavy refactoring of block verification)
Co-authored-by: Diva M <divma@protonmail.com>