The clean trie cache is persisted periodically, therefore Geth can
quickly warmup the cache in next restart.
However it will reduce the robustness of system. The assumption is
held in Geth that if the parent trie node is present, then the entire
sub-trie associated with the parent are all prensent.
Imagine the scenario that Geth rewinds itself to a past block and
restart, but Geth finds the root node of "future state" in clean
cache then regard this state is present in disk, while is not in fact.
Another example is offline pruning tool. Whenever an offline pruning
is performed, the clean cache file has to be removed to aviod hitting
the root node of "deleted states" in clean cache.
All in all, compare with the minor performance gain, system robustness
is something we care more.
rjl493456442
Martin Holst Swende