Steve [ARCHIVE] on Nostr: 📅 Original date posted:2011-09-06 🗒️ Summary of this message: The issue of ...
📅 Original date posted:2011-09-06
🗒️ Summary of this message: The issue of scalability in Bitcoin was discussed, with the potential problem of running out of sockets due to the increasing popularity of lightweight clients. A solution proposed was the use of frontend proxies to handle client capacity.
📝 Original message: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 at gmail.com
> <mailto:shadders.del at 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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🗒️ Summary of this message: The issue of scalability in Bitcoin was discussed, with the potential problem of running out of sockets due to the increasing popularity of lightweight clients. A solution proposed was the use of frontend proxies to handle client capacity.
📝 Original message: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 at gmail.com
> <mailto:shadders.del at 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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