Node version stats

[xaur]

Show various interesting stats about Decred nodes.

First iteration - current stats

• public listening vs non-listening nodes
• distribution by node version (e.g. pie chart)
• distribution by country
• distribution by ISP
• overlay nodes on world map

Basically match and improve upon this page https://dcred.eu/nodeStats

Automating collection of these stats would be a huge help to Decred Journal's Network section, and interesting public info in general.

Second iteration - historical data

Save hourly snapshots of all items from First iteration, and render them in charts.

• distribution by version over time chart similar to this one for hashrate would show network upgrade status
• distribution by country over time would show worldwide expansion

Side effect: attract more attention to the problem of the full node count not growing.

[chappjc]

Much like the design of rateserver and the exchanges package, there will need to be a separate crawler data provider. The simplest solution is to build an HTTP API into dcrseeder.

[xaur]

https://dcred.eu/nodeStats is "down for good" while https://dcrstats.com/map shows a lot of red lines, apparently after the recent consensus change.

As of now, we don't have a source for node stats for Decred Journal.

[chappjc]

For Decred Journal, I can pull stats out of a crawler I run. We will put this issue on the roadmap for 5.1

[xaur]

That's great! On the big picture, DJ is not too big of a motivation to implement such a big feature. Imo the big motivation is to have the data available so that anyone can assess network health. With both of those services down or showing stale info we got a bit "blind".

[chappjc]

I posted the following in Matrix. Mirroring here.

decred-public-nodes-2019-06-02.xlsx

public_nodes.json.gz

Service flags: full node = 1 bloom filter support =2 committed filter support = 4 e.g. full node with committed filter support = 5

     0     3     5     7
     4     6   232    28

[xaur]

Thanks, the continent, country, ISP, organization etc data is very interesting and deserves visualization (after some grouping and cleanup).

For user agents, I found this chart that illustrates what I would like to see:

https://charts.dcr.farm/d/000000014/nodes?orgId=1&from=now-40d&to=now

It shows charts of total listening nodes and histogram of user agents over time, which is very helpful to see how the network is upgrading.

[noahpierau]

Is someone actively working on this? It's an important feature to have.

[chappjc]

Not that I'm aware of. However, I think the first steps in this feature are to expanddcrseeder's API since dcrdata will not actually do the crawling.

[raedah]

@ademuanthony has done some work on this in the dcrextdata code base

@noahpierau can you share more specifically what you find important about it?

[ghost]

We need the NodeMap like https://bitnodes.earn.com/

[noahpierau]

It makes the global nature of Decred visible to outsiders. Showing a map with nodes all over the world is great for conferences. Also, a node map can be used to monitor how decentralized the network is.

[xaur]

charts.dcr.farm has been discontinued and now we don't have a source of month's average listening/total node counts for DJ.

dcrstats.com/map is the only working nodes map I know, but it shows a very short list of nodes.

Unless there is another nodes dashboard somewhere, we miss an important network metric.

[xaur]

Phew, we have something here: https://dcrextdata.planetdecred.org/nodes

[xaur]

Another new tool showing node count, world map and top 10 by country and ISP

https://nodes.jholdstock.uk/

Thanks @jholdstock!

[xaur]

I missed it initially but it also shows node version counts and has an epic theme!

https://nodes.jholdstock.uk/user_agents?theme=386