Published on: 2014-04-08T17:33:18+00:00
In a conversation about the possibility of having multiple network transports for Bitcoin, Wladimir van der Laan, the lead developer of Bitcoin Core, addresses concerns about the impact of high traffic on Bitcoin nodes. He assures that the default maximum amount of connections is 125, which should not be a problem for even cheap home routers. Furthermore, Bitcoin does not use UDP, so there are no issues with it. However, filling up a home DSL or cable modem's send buffer with outgoing data is possible and could cause delays in interactive traffic. Throttling to prevent this is planned but postponed until parallel block download is implemented. To improve network performance, Wladimir suggests starting with benchmarking and analysis to identify areas for improvement.The conversation also discusses the issues faced by the bittorrent community and how they were solved with uTP. These issues included home routers crashing or slowing down when their NAT pin-hole tables overflowed due to many TCP connections, as well as home DSL or cable modems experiencing delays in interactive traffic due to filled-up send buffers. The bittorrent community resolved these problems with uTP, which implements a congestion window algorithm for better performance. However, the conversation acknowledges the potential risks of introducing an own UDP network stack, such as inadvertent bugs or backdoors. It suggests that there can be multiple network transports for Bitcoin, encouraging someone to build an alternative transport protocol to gateway to and explore useful possibilities.Another aspect discussed is the issue of network performance. Matt Whitlock suggests that the real problem lies in people not knowing how to configure their routers correctly. He explains that Bitcoind only saturates the upstream link when transferring files using SCP because the router interprets the "maximize throughput" flag in the IP "type of service" field as meaning low priority, causing the SCP transfers to get stalled behind Bitcoind. Other activities like email, web browsing, instant messaging, and SSH do not experience degradation regardless of Bitcoind's activity. Matt proposes moving the packet queue from the cable modem to the router for intelligent decisions about packet priority and reordering to enhance network performance. He also argues that µTP reinvents the wheel with greater overhead in userspace, suggesting that proper quality of service (QoS) negates the need for it. The conversation emphasizes the importance of correctly configuring routers for optimal network performance.Overall, the author questions whether the traffic on a Bitcoin node will lead to problems for home routers and modems. They highlight issues like crashing or slowing down due to NAT pin-hole table overflow, UDP traffic, and filled-up send buffers causing delays in interactive traffic. The author suggests that these issues were successfully tackled by the bittorrent community with uTP, which utilizes a congestion window algorithm. Implementing uTP could potentially greatly improve the performance of the Bitcoin network. A link is provided for further information about uTP.
Updated on: 2023-08-01T08:39:29.444017+00:00