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Network Team Update

· 3 min read
Marcin Szamotulski

Network Update (Sprints 39 & 40)​

The network updates got distracted. Mostly because of me leaving for the meeting in Edinburgh, Scotland and the being away. It was great to see and talk to so many of the community members.

Sprint 39 (Jun 26 - Jul 09)​

Major changes​

Now the following list of traces will be turned on by default:

node-to-client protocol​
  • LocalConnectionManagerTracer
  • LocalInboundGovernor
  • LocalHandshake
  • LocalServer
node-to-node protocol​
  • Server

See cardano-node#5353. This will be released in node-8.2.0.

We made sure that cardano-client-0.1.0.x library (which is db-sync) is not using the experimental node-to-client protocol. The cardano-client-0.2.0.0 was not affected. See ouroboros-network#4612.

We merged the dynamic block production feature to ouroboros-consensus (also available in the cardano-node-8.2.0 release). Dynamic block production enables hot-swap p2p nodes, which are important for the p2p deployment of block-producing nodes. See ouroboros-network#3159, [ouroboros-consensu#140].

We continued to review the implementation of big ledger peers for eclipse evasion, see ouroboros-network#4462.

Minor changes​

Sprint 40 (Jul 09 - Jul 23)​

Major changes​

We integrated ouroboros-network-0.8.2.0 with the master branch of cardano-node for the 8.2.0 release (the version match between ouroboros-network and cardano-node is purely accidental). This includes:

  • integration with dynamic block production feature. This feature is documented in the following PR.
  • Warm valency for local root peers (see below).

For the full list of features included in the 8.2.0 release from the network side, please take a look at the pre-release nodes.

We improved the memory footprint of peer metrics measured by the P2P stack. Peer metrics are used to decide which peers to demote every churn interval (roughly every hour with some probabilistic fluctuation). See ouroboros-network#4620. The improvement will be available in cardano-node-8.2.0.

We added an optional explicit warm valency to local root peers of the P2P topology file. Previously we used an implicit valency, e.g. the node keeps connections to all of the local roots; with local warm valency the node will pick only that many peers from the local root peers group to connect to. The hot valency (previously known simply as valency) hasn't changed, but it must be smaller than the warm valency as hot peers are selected from warm ones. Warm valency is a useful feature to limit resource consumption if one of the domain names in the local root peer group resolves to many IP addresses. See ouroboros-network#4575, cardano-node#5409.