Why the runtime param "maxshowndata" has a default size of 16384 bytes?

Question

Hi, I know I can set the value with "setruntimeparam" and increase the size of "maxshowndata".The default size is 16384 bytes. What's the reason of a that small default size? Is it just about performance of the "liststreamitems" call or do I have to be careful increasing the value of "maxshowndata" because of other reasons?

Answer 1

It's about preventing API responses from being too large, since this can slow things down both inside MultiChain and inside your application. You can always use the gettxoutdata API to get the full data.

Comments

is there any performance advantage of using gettxoutdata instead of setting maxshowndata?

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If you always want the full data, there may be some minor advantage to using gettxoutdata, because it is not wrapping the data in a JSON object. But the main purpose of this setting is to enable cases where you do not want the full data for every call to a stream retrieval API.