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I have the Block Gas Limit of a private Parity-based blockchain set to 4,712,388. That's the "gasLimit" parameter. But when I view it on a block explorer on the very first block running on this network, it reads it as 4,700,036. That is a factor of 1.0026281/
And when I set it as 44,712,388, it reads in as 44,364,406. That is a factor of 1.0078437. So it's not consistent.
There must be some reason though. Right?
Apparently, Parity rounds the block gas limit value to multiplies of a constant (A follow-up question would be "why?". I can't find the answer yet. It probably should be a separate question anyway). See this comment in its source code. At the moment, the constant (i.e. see the next line - PARITY_GAS_LIMIT_DETERMINANT) is 37. And the two actual values in the question are both multiplies of 37.
4,700,036 = 37 * 127,028
44,364,406 = 37 * 1,199,038
Naturally one would notice the rounding result could have been closer to the original value 44,712,388. It turns out the rounding also takes into account another factor, i.e. a desired range, which is determined by the preceding blocks. See function round_block_gas_limit. This is the reason why it's not consistent.
