Added a new step, which attempts to filter out peers that are on inferior chains, by comparing them against each other and our chain. The basic logic is as follows:
1. Take the list of peers that we'd previously have chosen from randomly.
2. Figure out our common block with each of those peers (if its within 240 blocks), using cached data if possible.
3. Remove peers with no common block.
4. Find the earliest common block, and compare all peers with that common block against each other (and against our chain) using the chain weight method. This involves fetching (up to 200) summaries from each peer after the common block, and (up to 200) summaries from our own chain after the common block.
5. If our chain was superior, remove all peers with this common block, then move up to the next common block (in ascending order), and repeat from step 4.
6. If our chain was inferior, remove any peers with lower weights, then remove all peers with higher common blocks.
7. We end up with a reduced list of peers, that should in theory be on superior or equal chains to us. Pick one of those at random and sync to it.
This is a high risk feature - we don't yet know the impact on network load. Nor do we know whether it will cause issues due to prioritising longer chains, since the chain weight algorithm currently prefers them.
Main differences / improvements:
- Only request a single batch of signatures upfront, instead of the entire peer's chain. There is no point in requesting them all, as the later ones may not be valid by the time we have finished requesting all the blocks before them.
- If we fail to fetch a block, clear any queued signatures that are in memory and re-fetch signatures after the last block received. This allows us to cope with peers that re-org whilst we are syncing with them.
- If we can't find any more block signatures, or the peer fails to respond to a block, apply our progress anyway. This should reduce wasted work and network congestion, and helps cope with larger peer re-orgs.
- The retry mechanism remains in place, but instead of fetching the same incorrect block over and over, it will attempt to locate a new block signature each time, as described above. To help reduce code complexity, block signature requests are no longer retried.
Until now, we required a perfect success rate when syncing with a peer via Synchronizer.syncToPeerChain(). Blocks were requested individually, but the node would give up and lose all progress if a single request failed. In practice, this happened very regularly, and it was difficult to succeed when there were a large number of blocks (e.g. 20+) that needed to be requested.
This commit adds two retry mechanisms, causing each of the two request types (block sigs and blocks) to retry 3 times before giving up, potentially avoiding a lot of wasted work. The number of retries is configurable in the MAXIMUM_RETRIES constant, which we could move to settings at some point if this feature proves useful.
The original issue seemed to result in a few side effects:
1. Nodes would spend a large amount of time requesting blocks from peers, only to throw it all away afterwards. This potentially added to network congestion, as nodes were using unnecessary network time to unproductively serve peers.
2. A large number of sync attempts were failing, particularly when a fork emerged with a significant number of divergent blocks (20+). This issue reduced the ability for nodes to sync to the correct chain while they still had time to do so. With every block that passed, it became made it more and more difficult to switch to the correct chain. Eventually, the correct chain would become TOO_DIVERGENT at which point there is no way to automatically switch without manual intervention. I hope that this retry mechanism will increase the chances of nodes automatically moving onto the right chain quickly, avoiding the need for a user to intervene.
3. The POST /admin/forcesync API was unlikely to succeed when the peer's chain had started to diverge from the user's chain. This should increase the success rate.
Also included in this commit is a MAXIMUM_BLOCK_SIGNATURES_PER_REQUEST constant. This limits the number of block sigs requested in each batch (default 200). Without this, we are unable to increase MAXIMUM_COMMON_DELTA because it can try and request thousands of block sigs at once, which unsurprisingly doesn't succeed.
This bug often prevented the correct amount of block signatures (and blocks) from being requested from a peer, when trying to sync to it.
It could result in quite serious consequences, as it would trigger orphaning back to the common block without first requesting all of the necessary blocks from the peer's chain. Rather than applying a complete copy of the peer's chain, it could orphan back to the common block and then only apply a few blocks beyond that, leaving the node in an unexpected state, potentially hundreds of blocks behind the peer's current height, which it then has to try and obtain from other peers.
When there are forks present, this could result in it hopping from chain to chain, each time being unable to fully synchronise with the peer. Given that we currently discard our chain if it is deemed that our latest block isn't "recent", it is very important that nodes are brought up to the latest block when synchronising with a peer, to avoid constantly triggering discards.
The severity of this bug increased when there was a large disparity between the peer's latest block and the common block height, and prevented us from being able to increase MAXIMUM_COMMON_DELTA.
These are simpler than the level 1+2 tests; they only test that the rewards are correct for each level post-shareBinFix. I don't think we need multiple instances of the pre-shareBinFix or block orphaning tests. There are a few subtle differences between each test, such as the online status of Bob, in order the make the tests slightly more comprehensive.
1. Assign 3 minters (one founder, one level 1, one level 2)
2. Mint a block after the shareBinFix, ensuring that level 1 and 2 are being rewarded evenly from the same share bin.
3. Orphan the block and ensure the rewards are reversed.
4. Orphan two more blocks, each time checking that the balances are being reduced in accordance with the pre-shareBinFix mapping.
As importing a transaction requires blockchain lock, all the network threads
can be used up blocking for that lock, especially if Synchronizer is active.
So we simply discard incoming TRANSACTION messages if we can't immediately
obtain the blockchain lock. Some other peer will probably attempt to
send the transaction soon again anyway.
Plus we swap transaction lists after connection handshake.
Post trigger, account levels will map correctly to share bins, subtracting 1 to account for the 0th element of the shareBinsByLevel array.
Pre-trigger, the legacy mapping will remain in effect.
Post trigger, this change will use all 128 bytes of previous block's signature when
calculating/validating next block's "minter" signature (itself the first 64 bytes of a block signature).
Prior to trigger, current behaviour is to only use first 64 bytes of previous block's
signature, which doesn't encompass transactions signature.
New block sig code should help reduce forking and help improve transactional
security.
Added "newBlockSigHeight" to blockchain.json but initially set to block 999999
pending decision on when to merge, auto-update, go-live, etc.
