Question about validator agreement rate

[Twarden]

I was reviewing my validator's statistics on the registry this morning when I noticed something that I have never seen before:

Quote

2016-02-15

1.00000

0.00000

3189

For some reason on the 15th, my validator's agreement rate was 100% with 3189 validations.  Typically, my validator will have a disagreement rate of 0-3% with about 20,000 validations on average.  My question is how was my validator able to reach 100% agreement with so few validations an what factors were affecting this situation?  Also, can someone please clarify if it is beneficial at all to post more overall validations that have a very small percentage of disagreement or very few validations with 100% agreement?

Edited February 20, 2016 by Twarden

[xrptips]

Something strange was going on with the validator data that day because the Ripple Validators only validated 3189 ledgers that day as well.

https://validators.ripple.com/#/validators/n9L81uNCaPgtUJfaHh89gmdvXKAmSt5Gdsw2g1iPWaPkAHW5Nm4C

What's strange is that ripplecharts shows 24,203 ledgers for that day, not 3189. 

https://www.ripplecharts.com/#/metrics

This suggests that ~85% of the ledgers validated by the network on that day were not captured by the validator script at validators.ripple.com.

 

In my opinion it's more important to have a low disagreement rate than to have a high agreement rate. A low disagreement rate indicates that your proposed ledgers are often congruous with the rest of the network which contributes to network stability. If the network has 25K ledgers in a day and your validator proposes 1000 ledgers that are are all accepted by the network then you've contributed to network stability 1/25th of the time that day. If another validator submits 25K ledgers but none of the are accepted by the network then they've contributed to forward progress and network stability 0/25 percent of the time (0%). So submitted more ledgers, they're contributing less to the network than the validator submitting fewer proposals but disagreeing less often.

[nikb]

@xrptips is correct: the validator tracker had an issue which caused it to miss some of the validations. I don't know exactly what the issue was but it's just a script that collects validations, so it's possible the machine was restarted because of updates, and the script didn't start automatically or it had network connectivity issues, etc.

 

 

[Twarden]

Thank you @xrptips for the detailed explanation and @nikb for confirmation

Edited February 21, 2016 by Twarden