The full states upon which blocks are replayed are referred to as _snapshots_ in the case of the

freezer DB, and _epoch boundary states_ in the case of the hot DB.

in order to keep loads of recent states performant. For the freezer DB, the frequency is

configurable via the `--hierarchy-exponents` CLI flag, which is the topic of the next section.

_a lot_ of space. It's even possible to push beyond that with `--hierarchy-exponents 0` which

would store a full state every single slot (NOT RECOMMENDED).

- **Less diff layers are not necessarily faster**. One might expect that the fewer diff layers there

this seems to be offset by the increased size of diffs in each layer making the diffs take longer

to apply. We observed no significant performance benefit from `--hierarchy-exponents 5,7,11`, and

a substantial increase in space consumed.