wal

[faddat]

The write ahead log does some thrashing, and I'm curious if we can live without it.

for example, we could do the same thing in RAM, most devices have a ton of it these days, even mobiles.

the WAL seems quite tightly coupled with consensus. @jaekwon you reckon that it is possible to safely do consensus without the WAL? I feel like it actually is not the best thing. May make more sense to just ensure that there's a second fully-synced machine at the ready, than deal with all of the disk thrashing that the WAL causes.

End-state, we'd end up with something that runs more quickly, in more places.

[jaekwon]

I need proof that it's some sort of performance bottleneck, but Tendermint isn't the bottleneck for the kind of application we want to create.