From: Steve <shadders.del@gmail.com>
To: Mike Hearn <mike@plan99.net>
Cc: bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Building a node crawler to map network
Date: Wed, 07 Sep 2011 01:25:09 +1000 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <4E663B55.9050508@gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CANEZrP2Wh82sqGjZDn_M=UPufBCU4fP9zEXV_K8JpgVF8O1FCw@mail.gmail.com>
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Thanks for the overview Mike. I just bailed up Gavin on IRC and between
that convo and what you've just written I'm starting to picture a plan
in my head... This sounds right up my alley, I wish I didn't have to go
to bed right now as I've got a ton of ideas buzzing around I'd like to
get started on right now. But I'll be onto it as soon as I've got a
free moment...
On 07/09/11 00:52, Mike Hearn wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 4:17 PM, Steve <shadders.del@gmail.com
> <mailto:shadders.del@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> I'm not really understanding the use case though. I believe most
> bitcoind's have a default max connections of 8. Is the goal to
> increase this without fundamentally altering the bitcoind
> concurrency model?
>
>
> bitcoind already uses asynchronous IO. That's not the problem.
>
> The issue came up in a conversation about scalability. If Bitcoins
> popularity continues to grow, users are very likely to migrate away
> from running full verifying nodes to lightweight clients, either a
> different mode of the Satoshi client or different implementations like
> the Android Wallet or MultiBit.
>
> Lightweight clients cannot verify thus should not relay. And they'll
> be run by users who just want to send/receive coins from time to time,
> so don't leave the programs running 24/7. The result could be running
> out of sockets (like we have had problems with recently). It's
> especially true because lightweight clients cannot check transactions
> for themselves. If they want to show transactions appearing
> immediately (and they do), they have to use "heard from lots of nodes"
> as a proxy for validity. So lightweight clients are likely to be
> socket intensive.
>
> We could solve this by just hoping that lots of people run full nodes.
> The problem is that a full node is quite an intensive thing already,
> it uses lots of CPU and disk seeks, and will just get more expensive
> in future. And as transaction traffic increases, that leaves less CPU
> time available to service thousands of connected clients. The ROI of
> bringing up a new node decreases at the same time as the userbase
> increases.
>
> One traditional approach to solving this is frontend proxies.
> Jabber.com/org used this technique many years ago, and Google has also
> used it to scale up the lockservice
> <http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/labs.google.com/en/us/papers/chubby-osdi06.pdf> (see
> section 3.1). It's effective because often maintaining connections to
> thousands of clients doesn't involve much brainwork, just shifting
> bytes around. This is especially true of Bitcoin. So if somebody is
> running a full node already they could increase their client capacity
> by just bringing up a frontend proxy and having it handle things like
> outbound tx broadcasts/deduping inbound broadcasts, connection setup,
> relaying recently found blocks etc. A well written proxy could
> probably support tens of thousands of simultaneous clients which frees
> up the bitcoinds time for verification and wallet manipulation.
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2011-09-06 15:25 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 10+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2011-09-06 7:42 [Bitcoin-development] Building a node crawler to map network Steve
2011-09-06 8:29 ` Steve
2011-09-06 8:36 ` Christian Decker
2011-09-06 12:49 ` Mike Hearn
2011-09-06 13:27 ` Steve
2011-09-06 13:31 ` Mike Hearn
2011-09-06 14:17 ` Steve
2011-09-06 14:52 ` Mike Hearn
2011-09-06 15:25 ` Steve [this message]
2011-09-06 14:36 ` Rick Wesson
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