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Network Team Update

· 3 min read
Marcin Szamotulski

High-level overview of sprint 45​

Bootstrap Peers​

We started reviewing the bootstrap peers PR, ouroboros-network#4615.

Towards Typed Protocols 0.2.0.0​

We discovered a performance regression when using typed-protocols-0.2.0.0, and we started investigating where it comes from. Currently, we see that typed-protocols-0.2.0.0 can outperform typed-protocols-0.1.0.0 when running in isolation with a simple ping-pong protocol, so the regression might be in the new block fetch implementation which comes with typed-protocols-0.2.0.0 See typed-protocols#3.

Tech Debt​

We merged two PRs written by Galois engineers:

  • a pull request which refactors the main entry function for P2P, see ouroboros-network#3834;
  • a pull request which reviews usage of unsafe function in the network code based.

Galois also made progress with the following two issues:

IO-Sim​

IOSimPOR​

We found and fixed a bug in IOSimPOR. We'd like to thank Prof. John Hughes (Quviq AB) for helping us with debugging the issue.

We also provided a more uniform API for IOSimPOR, and added ways to make the debugging similar problems in the future easier.

Technical Details on IOSim refactoring
We removed the usage of `unsafePerformIO` from `IOSimPOR`, which also means removing parallel evaluation of discovered races. We found out that it gives only 25% better performance. In the future QuickCheck will offer running different cases in parallel which should provide better performance as there are no dependencies between the evaluation of different test cases, while schedules are discovered while running which limits the possible gains from running them concurrently. The performance was not the only factor though. When using parallelism in the lazy `ST` monad we'd need to rely on memory guarantees of `STRefs`. In `GHC-9.6` they share the implementation with `IORef`s, but it might not be the case in the future.

IOSim​

To prepare for the next release, we consolidate packages taking advantage of the public sublibraries supported now both by cabal and Hackage. This is a work in progress, io-sim#114.

Cardano Newtork Service Assurance​

Galois made the following progress:

  • A test run of spinning up a CNSA instance was done, as a result documentation was updated.
  • Based on the IOG code review of the CNSA code, updates to the CNSA code were made.
  • Galois has started the design for adding a CNSA analysis for "fetched bytes over time while node is syncing".

P2P adoption​

In the last two weeks, we've seen increase in P2P adoption. P2P relays

The following graphs show several different versions of relays running on the mainnet. The green line NodeToNodeVersionV10.True denotes P2P relays. node versions

Open Source​

We upstreamed our FFI bindings to Windows named pipes to Win32 package, the PR was accepted and merged.

We also received an external contribution which enhanced our documentation, see ouroboros-network#4676.