Ethereum developers have pushed out a last-minute software update to ensure that Tuesday's experimental trial run of the upcoming "Glamsterdam" upgrade can properly test a massive network capacity increase.

The urgent update was released late Monday by Prysm, a popular software program used to run the network. This new version (7.2.1), released late Monday, automatically scales the network's maximum computing power per block or transaction processing capacity up to a 200-million gas limit, up from the earlier version that capped it at 60-million gas.

Had it stayed that way, it would have diluted the test run specifically designed to see how the network copes with larger block sizes. In other words, blocks proposed at the old limit would have diluted the test, which is meant to show how the network copes with the larger size.

Validators on the latest version will start proposing 200 million-gas blocks automatically when Glamsterdam activates on Sepolia at around 13:53 UTC on Oct. 6.

Glamsterdam is Ethereum's next major upgrade, and it activates first on Sepolia, a test network where developers rehearse changes using tokens with no real value. A Tuesday's test raises Sepolia's gas limit from about 60 million to 200 million.

Gas is the unit Ethereum uses to measure how much computing work fits into a block. A higher limit gives the network room to process more transactions and more complex activity at once, though it also asks more of the computers that run Ethereum.

Ethereum has been raising block capacity in steps, testing how far it can go before running a validator becomes too demanding or expensive.

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