Replace assignments to individual fields of wire.NetAddress with
creating the entire object at once, as one would do if the type was
immutable.
In some places this replaces the creation of a NetAddress with a
high-precision timestamp with a call to a 'constructor' that converts
the timestamp to single second precision. For consistency, the tests
have also been changed to use single-precision timestamps.
Lastly, the number of allocations in readNetAddress have been reduced by
reading the services directly into the NetAddress instead of first into
a temporary variable.
This commit is the first stage of several that are planned to convert
the blockchain package into a concurrent safe package that will
ultimately allow support for multi-peer download and concurrent chain
processing. The goal is to update btcd proper after each step so it can
take advantage of the enhancements as they are developed.
In addition to the aforementioned benefit, this staged approach has been
chosen since it is absolutely critical to maintain consensus.
Separating the changes into several stages makes it easier for reviewers
to logically follow what is happening and therefore helps prevent
consensus bugs. Naturally there are significant automated tests to help
prevent consensus issues as well.
The main focus of this stage is to convert the blockchain package to use
the new database interface and implement the chain-related functionality
which it no longer handles. It also aims to improve efficiency in
various areas by making use of the new database and chain capabilities.
The following is an overview of the chain changes:
- Update to use the new database interface
- Add chain-related functionality that the old database used to handle
- Main chain structure and state
- Transaction spend tracking
- Implement a new pruned unspent transaction output (utxo) set
- Provides efficient direct access to the unspent transaction outputs
- Uses a domain specific compression algorithm that understands the
standard transaction scripts in order to significantly compress them
- Removes reliance on the transaction index and paves the way toward
eventually enabling block pruning
- Modify the New function to accept a Config struct instead of
inidividual parameters
- Replace the old TxStore type with a new UtxoViewpoint type that makes
use of the new pruned utxo set
- Convert code to treat the new UtxoViewpoint as a rolling view that is
used between connects and disconnects to improve efficiency
- Make best chain state always set when the chain instance is created
- Remove now unnecessary logic for dealing with unset best state
- Make all exported functions concurrent safe
- Currently using a single chain state lock as it provides a straight
forward and easy to review path forward however this can be improved
with more fine grained locking
- Optimize various cases where full blocks were being loaded when only
the header is needed to help reduce the I/O load
- Add the ability for callers to get a snapshot of the current best
chain stats in a concurrent safe fashion
- Does not block callers while new blocks are being processed
- Make error messages that reference transaction outputs consistently
use <transaction hash>:<output index>
- Introduce a new AssertError type an convert internal consistency
checks to use it
- Update tests and examples to reflect the changes
- Add a full suite of tests to ensure correct functionality of the new
code
The following is an overview of the btcd changes:
- Update to use the new database and chain interfaces
- Temporarily remove all code related to the transaction index
- Temporarily remove all code related to the address index
- Convert all code that uses transaction stores to use the new utxo
view
- Rework several calls that required the block manager for safe
concurrency to use the chain package directly now that it is
concurrent safe
- Change all calls to obtain the best hash to use the new best state
snapshot capability from the chain package
- Remove workaround for limits on fetching height ranges since the new
database interface no longer imposes them
- Correct the gettxout RPC handler to return the best chain hash as
opposed the hash the txout was found in
- Optimize various RPC handlers:
- Change several of the RPC handlers to use the new chain snapshot
capability to avoid needlessly loading data
- Update several handlers to use new functionality to avoid accessing
the block manager so they are able to return the data without
blocking when the server is busy processing blocks
- Update non-verbose getblock to avoid deserialization and
serialization overhead
- Update getblockheader to request the block height directly from
chain and only load the header
- Update getdifficulty to use the new cached data from chain
- Update getmininginfo to use the new cached data from chain
- Update non-verbose getrawtransaction to avoid deserialization and
serialization overhead
- Update gettxout to use the new utxo store versus loading
full transactions using the transaction index
The following is an overview of the utility changes:
- Update addblock to use the new database and chain interfaces
- Update findcheckpoint to use the new database and chain interfaces
- Remove the dropafter utility which is no longer supported
NOTE: The transaction index and address index will be reimplemented in
another commit.
Since the protocol encodes timestamps differently depending on the
message, the code currently decodes into a local variable and then
converts it to a time.Time. However, this causes an allocation due to
the local having to escape to the heap in order for the readElement
function to write to it.
So, in order to avoid that, this introduces two new types for a
timestamp named uint32Time and int64Time that are encoded as the
respective type on the read. When calling the readElements function,
the time.Time field in the message is cast to a pointer of the
appropriate type which effectively allows the allocations to be avoided.
The following is a before and after comparison of the allocations
with the benchmarks that did not change removed:
benchmark old allocs new allocs delta
----------------------------------------------------------------------
ReadBlockHeader 1 0 -100.00%
DecodeHeaders 4001 2001 -49.99%
DecodeAddr 4001 3001 -24.99%
DecodeMerkleBlock 108 107 -0.93%
This introduces a new binary free list which provides a concurrent safe
list of unused buffers for the purpose of serializing and deserializing
primitive integers to their raw binary bytes.
For convenience, the type also provides functions for each of the
primitive unsigned integers that automatically obtain a buffer from the
free list, perform the necessary binary conversion, read from or write
to the given io.Reader or io.Writer, and return the buffer to the free
list.
A global instance of the type has been introduced with a maximum number
of 1024 items. Since each buffer is 8 bytes, it will consume a maximum
of 8KB. Theoretically, this value would only allow up to 1024 peers
simultaneously reading and writing without having to resort to burdening
the garbage collector with additional allocations. However, due to the
fact the code is designed in such a way that the buffers are quickly
used and returned to the free list, in practice it can support much more
than 1024 peers without involving the garbage collector since it is
highly unlikely every peer would need a buffer at the exact same time.
The following is a before and after comparison of the allocations
with the benchmarks that did not change removed:
benchmark old allocs new allocs delta
-------------------------------------------------------------
WriteVarInt1 1 0 -100.00%
WriteVarInt3 1 0 -100.00%
WriteVarInt5 1 0 -100.00%
WriteVarInt9 1 0 -100.00%
ReadVarInt1 1 0 -100.00%
ReadVarInt3 1 0 -100.00%
ReadVarInt5 1 0 -100.00%
ReadVarInt9 1 0 -100.00%
ReadVarStr4 3 2 -33.33%
ReadVarStr10 3 2 -33.33%
WriteVarStr4 2 1 -50.00%
WriteVarStr10 2 1 -50.00%
ReadOutPoint 1 0 -100.00%
WriteOutPoint 1 0 -100.00%
ReadTxOut 3 1 -66.67%
WriteTxOut 2 0 -100.00%
ReadTxIn 5 2 -60.00%
WriteTxIn 3 0 -100.00%
DeserializeTxSmall 15 7 -53.33%
DeserializeTxLarge 33428 16715 -50.00%
SerializeTx 8 0 -100.00%
ReadBlockHeader 7 1 -85.71%
WriteBlockHeader 10 4 -60.00%
DecodeGetHeaders 1004 501 -50.10%
DecodeHeaders 18002 4001 -77.77%
DecodeGetBlocks 1004 501 -50.10%
DecodeAddr 9002 4001 -55.55%
DecodeInv 150005 50003 -66.67%
DecodeNotFound 150004 50002 -66.67%
DecodeMerkleBlock 222 108 -51.35%
TxSha 10 2 -80.00%
This commit contains the entire btcwire repository along with several
changes needed to move all of the files into the wire directory in
order to prepare it for merging. This does NOT update btcd or any of the
other packages to use the new location as that will be done separately.
- All import paths in the old btcwire test files have been changed to the
new location
- All references to btcwire as the package name have been chagned to
wire
- The coveralls badge has been removed since it unfortunately doesn't
support coverage of sub-packages
This is ongoing work toward #214.
