We have a number of queues for different purposes:
* regular broadcast queue
* direct p2p queue
* high-priority queue
And two basic egress scenarios:
* direct p2p messages (replies to requests in Server's handle* methods)
* broadcasted messages
Low priority broadcasted messages:
* transaction inventories
* block inventories
* notary inventories
* non-consensus extensibles
High-priority broadcasted messages:
* consensus extensibles
* getdata transaction requests from consensus process
* getaddr requests
P2P messages are a bit more complicated, most of the time they use p2p queue,
but extensible message requests/replies use HP queue.
Server's handle* code is run from Peer's handleIncoming, every peer has this
thread that handles incoming messages. When working with the peer it's
important to reply to requests and blocking this thread until we send (queue)
a reply is fine, if the peer is slow we just won't get anything new from
it. The queue used is irrelevant wrt this issue.
Broadcasted messages are radically different, we want them to be delivered to
many peers, but we don't care about specific ones. If it's delivered to 2/3 of
the peers we're fine, if it's delivered to more of them --- it's not an
issue. But doing this fairly is not an easy thing, current code tries performing
unblocked sends and if this doesn't yield enough results it then blocks (but
has a timeout, we can't wait indefinitely). But it does so in sequential
manner, once the peer is chosen the code will wait for it (and only it) until
timeout happens.
What can be done instead is an attempt to push the message to all of the peers
simultaneously (or close to that). If they all deliver --- OK, if some block
and wait then we can wait until _any_ of them pushes the message through (or
global timeout happens, we still can't wait forever). If we have enough
deliveries then we can cancel pending ones and it's again not an error if
these canceled threads still do their job.
This makes the system more dynamic and adds some substantial processing
overhead, but it's a networking code, any of this overhead is much lower than
the actual packet delivery time. It also allows to spread the load more
fairly, if there is any spare queue it'll get the packet and release the
broadcaster. On the next broadcast iteration another peer is more likely to be
chosen just because it didn't get a message previously (and had some time to
deliver already queued messages).
It works perfectly in tests, with optimal networking conditions we have much
better block times and TPS increases by 5-25%% depending on the scenario.
I'd go as far as to say that it fixes the original problem of #2678, because
in this particular scenario we have empty queues in ~100% of the cases and
this new logic will likely lead to 100% fan out in this case (cancelation just
won't happen fast enough). But when the load grows and there is some waiting
in the queue it will optimize out the slowest links.
Right now a single slow peer can slow down whole network.
Do broadcast in 2 parts:
1. Perform non-blocking send to all peers if possible.
2. Perform blocking sends until message is sent to 2/3 of good peers.
Turns out, C# node no longer broadcasts an Inv when it's creating a block,
instead it sends a ping and if we're not paying attention to the height
specified there we're technically missing a new block. Of course we'll get it
later after ping timer expiration and regular ping/pong sequence, but that's
delaying it for no good reason.
This one is designed to give more priority to direct nodes communication, that
is that their messaging would have more priority than generic broadcasts. It
should improve consensus process under TX pressure and allow to handle
pings in time (preventing disconnects).
Our node was too pingy because of wrong timer setups (that divided timeout
Duration by time.Second), it also was wrong in its time calculations (using
UTC time to calculate intervals). At the same time missing block is a
server-wide problem, so it's better solved with server-wide protocol loop.
1) Make timeout a timeout, don't do magic ping counts.
2) Drop additional timer from the main peer's protocol loop, create it
dynamically and make it disconnect the peer.
3) Don't expose the ping counter to the outside, handle more logic inside the
Peer.
Relates to #430.
Two queues for high-priority and ordinary messages. Fixes#590. These queues
are deliberately made small to avoid buffer bloat problem, there is gonna be
another queueing layer above them to compensate for that. The queues are
designed to be synchronous in enqueueing, async capabilities are to be added
layer above later.
add pingInterval same as used in ref C# implementation with the same logic
add pingTimeout which is used to check whether pong received. If not -- drop the peer.
add pingLimit which is hardcoded to 4 in TCPPeer. It's limit for unsuccessful ping/pong calls (where pong wasn't received in pingTimeout interval)
Fixes things like:
* exported type/method/function X should have comment or be unexported
* comment on exported type/method/function X should be of the form "X ..."
(with optional leading article)
Refs. #213.
* block partial persist
* replaced refactored files with old one.
* removed gokit/log from deps
* Tweaks to not overburden remote nodes with getheaders/getblocks
* Changed Transporter interface to not take the server as argument due to a cause of race warning from the compiler
* started server test suite
* more test + return errors from message handlers
* removed --race from build
* Little improvements.
* refactored tcp transport
* return errors on outgoing messages
* TCP transport should report its error after reading from connection
* handle error returned from peer transport
* bump version
* cleaned up error
