This forces the message handling thread to make another full
iteration of SendMessages prior to going back to sleep, ensuring
we announce the new block to all peers before sleeping.
This disentangles the script validation skipping from checkpoints.
A new option is introduced "assumevalid" which specifies a block whos
ancestors we assume all have valid scriptsigs and so we do not check
them when they are also burried under the best header by two weeks
worth of work.
Unlike checkpoints this has no influence on consensus unless you set
it to a block with an invalid history. Because of this it can be
easily be updated without risk of influencing the network consensus.
This results in a massive IBD speedup.
This approach was independently recommended by Peter Todd and Luke-Jr
since POW based signature skipping (see PR#9180) does not have the
verifiable properties of a specific hash and may create bad incentives.
The downside is that, like checkpoints, the defaults bitrot and older
releases will sync slower. On the plus side users can provide their
own value here, and if they set it to something crazy all that will
happen is more time will be spend validating signatures.
Checkblocks and checklevel are also moved to the hidden debug options:
Especially now that checkblocks has a low default there is little need
to change these settings, and users frequently misunderstand them as
influencing security or IBD speed. By hiding them we offset the
space added by this new option.
vRecvMsg is now only touched by the socket handler thread.
The accounting vars (nRecvBytes/nLastRecv/mapRecvBytesPerMsgCmd) are also
only used by the socket handler thread, with the exception of queries from
rpc/gui. These accesses are not threadsafe, but they never were. This needs to
be addressed separately.
Also, update comment describing data flow
Similar to the recv flag, but this one indicates whether or not the net's send
buffer is full.
The socket handler checks the send queue when a new message is added and pauses
if necessary, and possibly unpauses after each message is drained from its buffer.
Messages are dumped very quickly from the socket handler to the processor, so
it's the depth of the processing queue that's interesting.
The socket handler checks the process queue's size during the brief message
hand-off and pauses if necessary, and the processor possibly unpauses each time
a message is popped off of its queue.
In order to sleep accurately, the message handler needs to know if _any_ node
has more processing that it should do before the entire thread sleeps.
Rather than returning a value that represents whether ProcessMessages
encountered a message that should trigger a disconnnect, interpret the return
value as whether or not that node has more work to do.
Also, use a global fProcessWake value that can be set by other threads,
which takes precedence (for one cycle) over the messagehandler's decision.
Note that the previous behavior was to only process one message per loop
(except in the case of a bad checksum or invalid header). That was changed in
PR #3180.
The only change here in that regard is that the current node now falls to the
back of the processing queue for the bad checksum/invalid header cases.
In spite of the name FindLatestBefore used std::lower_bound to try
to find the earliest block with a nTime greater or equal to the
the requested value. But lower_bound uses bisection and requires
the input to be ordered with respect to the comparison operation.
Block times are not well ordered.
I don't know what lower_bound is permitted to do when the data
is not sufficiently ordered, but it's probably not good.
(I could construct an implementation which would infinite loop...)
To resolve the issue this commit introduces a maximum-so-far to the
block indexes and searches that.
For clarity the function is renamed to reflect what it actually does.
An issue that remains is that there is no grace period in importmulti:
If a address is created at time T and a send is immediately broadcast
and included by a miner with a slow clock there may not yet have been
any block with at least time T.
The normal rescan has a grace period of 7200 seconds, but importmulti
does not.
There is still a call to ActivateBestChain with cs_main if a peer
requests the block prior to it being validated, but this one is
more specifically-gated, so should be less of an issue.
On repeated calls to SelectCoins we try to meet the fee necessary for the last transaction, the new fee required might be smaller, so increase our change by the difference if we can.
Once we've picked coins and dummy-signed the transaction to calculate fee, if we don't have sufficient fee, then try to meet the fee by reducing change before resorting to picking new coins.
Previously addnodes were in competition with outbound connections
for access to the eight outbound slots.
One result of this is that frequently a node with several addnode
configured peers would end up connected to none of them, because
while the addnode loop was in its two minute sleep the automatic
connection logic would fill any free slots with random peers.
This is particularly unwelcome to users trying to maintain links
to specific nodes for fast block relay or purposes.
Another result is that a group of nine or more nodes which are
have addnode configured towards each other can become partitioned
from the public network.
This commit introduces a new limit of eight connections just for
addnode peers which is not subject to any of the other connection
limitations (including maxconnections).
The choice of eight is sufficient so that under no condition would
a user find themselves connected to fewer addnoded peers than
previously. It is also low enough that users who are confused
about the significance of more connections and have gotten too
copy-and-paste happy will not consume more than twice the slot
usage of a typical user.
Any additional load on the network resulting from this will likely
be offset by a reduction in users applying even more wasteful
workaround for the prior behavior.
The retry delays are reduced to avoid nodes sitting around without
their added peers up, but are still sufficient to prevent overly
aggressive repeated connections. The reduced delays also make
the system much more responsive to the addnode RPC.
Ban-disconnects are also exempted for peers added via addnode since
the outbound addnode logic ignores bans. Previously it would ban
an addnode then immediately reconnect to it.
A minor change was also made to CSemaphoreGrant so that it is
possible to re-acquire via an object whos grant was moved.
Performing signing in the inner loop has terrible performance
when many passes through are needed to complete the selection.
Signing before the algorithm is complete also gets in the way
of correctly setting the fee (e.g. preventing over-payment when
the fee required goes down on the final selection.)
Use of the dummy might overpay on the signatures by a couple bytes
in uncommon cases where the signatures' DER encoding is smaller
than the dummy: Who cares?
In order to do this, we must call ActivateBestChain prior to
responding getdata requests for blocks which we announced using
compact blocks.
For getheaders responses we dont need code changes, but do note
that we must reset the bestHeaderSent so that the SendMessages call
re-announces the header in question.
While we could do something smarter for getblocks, calling
ActivateBestChain is simple and more obviously correct, instead of
doing something more similar to getheaders.
See-also the BIP clarifications at
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/486
Wladimir J. van der Laan