Documentation

A backoff delay

If the horizon is very far away, the current tip is very far away from the wallclock. However, that probably does not mean we have to wait now - horizon time: we are probably just syncing, and so the tip of the ledger will rapidly move forward. So at most now - horizon could be used as a heuristic for how long to wait. For now we just trace it.

Instead, we just return a fixed delay of backoffDelay. There is a trade-off between trying to often, incurring computational overhead, and missing the opportunity to produce a block. For mainnet, we anticipate a 60 second delay will keep both the computational overhead and the number of slots we might miss reasonably small. We anyway can't guarantee the speed of syncing, so delaying it by a further 60 seconds as needed does not change anything fundamentally.

(NOTE: We could reduce this delay but Edsko doesn't think it would change very much, and it would increase the frequency of the trace messages and incur computational overhead.)

BlockchainTime instance with support for the hard fork history