History and Clio

A new ledger appears every few seconds. Each one adds to the pile of history. Keep all of it and the pile gets enormous.

Good news: a server does not need the pile to do its job. Every ledger carries the full current picture, every balance and every setting. To process new transactions, the latest ledger is enough.

So by default, xrpld tidies up after itself. It keeps the most recent 2,000 ledgers and throws away older ones. The current state is always kept.

The catch is memory. A server can only answer questions about history it still has. Ask a tidy server about a payment from last year and it says it cannot find it. The payment still happened. That server no longer has the page.

Some servers keep everything. These are full history servers. They are expensive to run. A few operators offer them as a public service.

Then there is Clio. Think of xrpld as a busy clerk who does everything: talks to other servers, checks transactions, answers the phone. Clio takes over the phone. It keeps its own tidy copy of confirmed records and answers lookups from that. It stores the same history in much less space. Several Clio servers can share one copy.

Clio only knows confirmed data. For anything live, such as sending a transaction, it passes the request to xrpld and relays the answer.

Online deletion. online_delete in the [node_db] stanza sets how many validated ledger versions to keep. The default config uses 2000. The minimum is 256, because fee voting and the amendment process update only every 256 ledgers. With automatic deletion a server may hold up to about twice the configured number before it trims. Advisory deletion waits for an admin's can_delete call.

Backfilling. [ledger_history] sets a minimum number of ledgers to fetch from peers. The special value full requests everything. It cannot be used to store less than online_delete. Backfilling is among the server's lowest priorities and needs a peer that has the data.

Available range. server_info reports complete_ledgers. The earliest ledger available anywhere is 32570. Ledgers 1 through 32569 were lost early in the ledger's history.

Full history. No online deletion. Figures from xrpl.org, dated 2026-01-25:

• About 39 terabytes, all on fast solid state disks.
• Growth of about 12 GB per day.
• NuDB files larger than ext4's 16 TB single-file limit. XFS is recommended.
• Acquiring it from peers takes several months.

Public full history: xrplcluster.com, operated by community members, and s2.ripple.com.

Clio.

xrpld's gRPC API exists specifically to feed Clio and may change without warning.

Always forwarded to xrpld:

• Requests with ledger_index set to current or closed.
• ledger with accounts, queue or full set to true.
• account_info with queue set to true.
• submit, submit_multisigned, fee, ledger_closed, ledger_current, ripple_path_find, manifest, channel_authorize, channel_verify.

Clio can also become amendment blocked. See After the vote.

Related: Running a validator.