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Published 20 hours ago • verified publisher icon dedis

Skipblock propagations

Open ineiti opened this issue 6 years ago • 4 comments

We have three times startPropagation in skipchain/skipchain.go, which can confuse things, specifically if the genesis-block already has its forward-links updated, but the block it points to is not available yet.

Cleanup: keep only one startPropagation in StoreSkipBlock.

ineiti avatar Apr 20 '18 21:04 ineiti

It is difficult to get right without breaking old skipchain implementations. As an exercise, until cothority.v3, this will stay with three startPropagation.

  1. when creating a new skipchain in StoreSkipBlock
  2. when creating the forwardLink level 0
  3. when adding an additional forwardLink level

ineiti avatar May 18 '18 06:05 ineiti

See also #1068

ineiti avatar Aug 07 '18 08:08 ineiti

We'll be changing the protocol to fix this issue, so it has to be done before v3 release or for v4. We're very close to the release date so I'm not sure whether we should commit to this issue given that it is an optimisation/cleanup. It's likely that optimising skipblock propagation will help but we also don't know how much. Maybe there should be a student project that thoroughly investigates the bottlenecks (CPU/network/disk) of cothority then go from there. What do you think @jeffallen @Gilthoniel ?

kc1212 avatar Feb 07 '19 16:02 kc1212

Taking out of v3, marking for a student project maybe.

jeffallen avatar Feb 08 '19 12:02 jeffallen