setMode(offline) results in: Cannot sleep - syncing ongoing

[MatthiasLohr]

I want to control parity's syncing behavior with the parity_setMode api call (https://wiki.parity.io/JSONRPC-parity_set-module#parity_setmode). But this does not work reliable.

System Details

• Parity Ethereum version: v2.5.1
• Operating system: Linux (Ubuntu 18.04 LTS)
• Installation: docker
• Fully synchronized: no
• Network: ethereum
• Restarted: no

Actual Behavior

Calling parity_setMode('offline') only stops syncing if the queue size is small enough (https://github.com/paritytech/parity-ethereum/blob/21a27fee9f0e23777d9f14b3d3d74fa3d1b63a9d/ethcore/src/client/client.rs#L1211).

Expected Behavior

If I call parity_setMode('offline') I would except that the sync process stops - regardless of queue size. If I want to stop the node, I'm completely ok with throwing the queue contents away. I can also see no reason for this limitation.

Further Notes

• The current behavior should be documented, there's nothing about this limitation
• One solution could be to add a force=True parameter

[SvenPeldszus]

I also had this struggle, hopefully you can fix this behavior soon or add something like a "force" parameter

[MatthiasLohr]

@joshua-mir, thanks for scheduling this! Any idea when 2.6 will be released?

[jam10o-new]

@MatthiasLohr we don't use milestones to schedule features, just look at some of our older open issues 😅- they are implemented when they are implemented. They are primarily used to know which branch to backport features if they are implemented - so new features part of the 2.6 milestone, if labelled for backporting, would end up in 2.5.x Beta, and bugfixes would be in the 2.4.x Stable branch.

This process is currently in flux however, so most new features and fixes are sitting in nightly for now.

[MatthiasLohr]

Just found out there's also a bug here: If I set the mode via parity_setMode to offline and I get this error message, I would expect that parity_mode still says active - but it says offline (while parity is still syncing)!