I haven't written a patch for this, I might do so if there's sufficient interest.
Nodes that are under heavy load exhibit extremely high latency, this makes downloading the block chain from a node that is itself downloading the block chain basically useless as it takes 30-60 seconds for the node to respond to clients. It could be fixed by making nodes not accept connections/advertise until they feel sure they have the best chain, but a more general fix is to add a "pong" which is returned by "ping". It could contain some useful stats about the node for network crawlers, but most importantly timing the delta between ping and pong would let you order nodes by responsiveness. Currently if you want to do this, it has to be indirect, using some message that is guarantee to yield a known response. Because old clients ignore messages they don't understand, adding the pong response would be easy and backwards compatible. Making nodes prefer responsive servers might need a bit of care to avoid sloshing load around too much. Thoughts? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Special Offer -- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! And you'll get a free "Love Thy Logs" t-shirt when you download Logger. Secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsisghtdev2dev _______________________________________________ Bitcoin-development mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
