Re: [Bitcoin-development] Cut-through propagation of blocks

[Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell@gmail.com>]

On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 8:57 PM, Ashley Holman <dscvlt@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> On this list there has been some discussion around techniques to speed up
> block propagation, with a particular focus on reducing the extra orphan risk
> carried by larger blocks.
> The current store-and-forward method means that larger blocks will propagate
> with higher latency.

FWIW, there are a lot of improvements which can be made before more
complex changes like cut-through-forwarding that change the protocol.

For example, the reference software has a 100ms sleep in p2p message
processing which could be replaced with a semaphore, this would
dramatically lower latency for block relaying.

Likewise nodes which are becoming bandwidth overloaded could adapt
their concurrent connection counts down (and ones that are underloaded
could accept more connections).

Relaying to multiple peers could be done in parallel instead of
serialized, and the order in which peers are relayed to could be
adapted to place more apparently useful and faster peers first, e.g.
every time a peer is the first to tell you about a block or
transaction you accept they move up the list, every time their socket
send queue fills they move down.

Luke-Jr had implemented cut through behavior previously and had posted
a patch, but absent those other network processing improvements it
didn't appear to help.


If you want to go full out crazy in optimizing in this space, there
are fancier things that can be done to further reduce latency and
increase efficiency:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/User:Gmaxwell/block_network_coding  ... but
some of this stuff really should be done as a seperate protocol. There
is no need to have Bitcoin transport all using a single protocol, and
we can get better robustness and feature velocity if there are a
couple protocols in use (you could just run a block-transport-protocol
daemon that connects to your local node via the classic protocol).