Nodes can ignore the data in unsubscribed stream

Question

Hi,

In the blog post on streams, it was stated that the nodes can ignore the data contained by streams it does not subscribe to. In terms of your implementation, what does this mean? Is there a performance gain? My confusion arise from the fact that everything is still stored on the node (so is it really ignored?)

Thanks,

R.

Answer 1

Nodes ignore the data in the sense that they store it in their copy of the blockchain on disk, but do not index it in any way for efficient retrieval by APIs like liststreamitems, liststreampublishers, liststreamkeyitems. So it takes minimal space to store, and minimal time to process.