Re: How (and why) to use the Relay Network

[p3yot33at3r]

LOL, I'm blind! That is disconnecting from 127.0.0.1, so, yea, its not able to hold a connection to your bitcoind (because your bitcoind is overloaded). It has little to nothing to do with the relay network.

You & me both!  

I couldn't understand why it was happening, then I realized that the other merge mined coins were also connecting on port 127.0.0.1 & it hit me when I read about the default rpc being set at 4 - what a plonker I am!  

Still, if nothing else - I've just learned something more & you've tuned the relaynetworkclient even more in your search for a solution.......

Thanks Matt, & sorry to have wasted your valuable time  

Edit: I'm still confused as to why it has only recently started causing problems though, it ran fine since the beginning........

[loshia]

The real problem is not that your btcd is overloaded. Every btcd will reach max peer count sooner or later. Just make sure that there is always a room for relay client
Can I say that my btcd with 150 peers is overloaded - no of course. I just want it to work that way but I do always have a room for relay client always

[jonnybravo0311]

LOL, I'm blind! That is disconnecting from 127.0.0.1, so, yea, its not able to hold a connection to your bitcoind (because your bitcoind is overloaded). It has little to nothing to do with the relay network.

You & me both!  

I couldn't understand why it was happening, then I realized that the other merge mined coins were also connecting on port 127.0.0.1 & it hit me when I read about the default rpc being set at 4 - what a plonker I am!  

Still, if nothing else - I've just learned something more & you've tuned the relaynetworkclient even more in your search for a solution.......

Thanks Matt, & sorry to have wasted your valuable time  

Edit: I'm still confused as to why it has only recently started causing problems though, it ran fine since the beginning........

Merge mining other coins has no impact on your bitcoind.  The impact it has is on your miners... the more coins you are merge mining, the more restarts your miners are subjected to.  You aren't connecting to port 127.0.0.1 - that's an IP address.  You are connecting to that IP address on multiple different ports (each coin has its own... for example, Bitcoin's RPC port is 8332).  What do you have running that could be consuming the RPC connections?  That's what you need to investigate.  P2Pool is certainly one... anything else?

[loshia]

Jonny,
Relay client is like Bitcoin node peer for his btcd. It has nothing to do with RPC or how ovreloaded btc deamon was.
Max peer count is exhausted and that is all. All of us shall take care of it in one way or on other.

[jonnybravo0311]

Exactly.  I was asking him to investigate what he's got going on with his bitcoin daemon since the relay client doesn't connect to issue RPC commands over 8332, it connects as a peer over 8333.  I was also letting him know that merge mining coins on p2pool doesn't impact his bitcoin daemon.  It impacts his miners, and the pool is constantly sending restarts (resulting in higher discarded/rejected work) as new blocks are found on those alt coins.

In other words, changing the rpcthreads parameter should have no impact on the relay client.  Now, if he's solo mining and has 100 miners pointed to that bitcoin daemon, each making requests to create blocks, then he'd want to increase the rpcthreads parameter.

Seeing all of those disconnects, I'd suggest looking at the maxconnections.  Default is 125.  If he's running up against that number, then the relay client connection could be rejected by the node.  Then again, my node runs at 125 connections and the relay network doesn't suffer the disconnection problem he's reporting.

[loshia]

Thanks Jonny,
That was exactly what I wanted to say from beginnig. But my English sucks

[Matt Corallo]

Added a node in Siberia which improves Japan/Beijing<->EU times, though its not publicly available to connect to (if anyone is mining in Russia and wants to connect to it, please ping me). Check out the nice little map of where the nodes are now at the bottom of the stats page (http://bitcoinrelaynetwork.org/stats.html#hotspot_map)

[squidicuz]

Check out the nice little map of where the nodes are now at the bottom of the stats page (http://bitcoinrelaynetwork.org/stats.html#hotspot_map)

Awesome!  It is neat being able to see the network map.

[kano]

Added a node in Siberia which improves Japan/Beijing<->EU times, though its not publicly available to connect to (if anyone is mining in Russia and wants to connect to it, please ping me). Check out the nice little map of where the nodes are now at the bottom of the stats page (http://bitcoinrelaynetwork.org/stats.html#hotspot_map)

Question:
So if I see 'S' 66% sends and 'R' 34% receives in the data in my log, that would represent that I'm supplying ~50% of the transactions to the server I connect to?
... since each receive is followed by a send, 'S' 66% would be 100% of the transactions and 'R' 34% would be the amount of those transaction that were sent to me?
i.e. 100 - (R / S) would be my % ?

[Matt Corallo]

Question:
So if I see 'S' 66% sends and 'R' 34% receives in the data in my log, that would represent that I'm supplying ~50% of the transactions to the server I connect to?
... since each receive is followed by a send, 'S' 66% would be 100% of the transactions and 'R' 34% would be the amount of those transaction that were sent to me?
i.e. 100 - (R / S) would be my % ?

Ignore out-of-band transactions (it should be pretty much 1:1, then, which means you are, as expected, pretty much just echoing all the transactions the server sends you...see https://github.com/TheBlueMatt/RelayNode/issues/11). Out-of-band transactions are just you sending transactions that the relay network may or may not have already seen that probably arent going to be used to compress things (see https://github.com/TheBlueMatt/RelayNode/issues/13).

[Matt Corallo]

In other news, things seem to be working pretty well now but I probably wont be able to devote a ton of time writing new features in the near future, and since I spent a ton of time recently refactoring the whole codebase, contributing should now be reasonably possible. I'm sure we could drop global relay times another 10-20% pretty easily, and put up some issues at https://github.com/TheBlueMatt/RelayNode/issues that should be reasonably doable for people without stepping on code everywhere else (well, except maybe the rething-low-level-transport-protocol one).

[amaclin]

WTF with latest executable?

Code:

D:\RelayNetwork>relaynetworkclient.exe
Assertion failed: connection.cpp:78

D:\RelayNetwork>relaynetworkclient.exe --help
UASsAsGeEr:t iDo:n\ failed: connection.cReplpa:y7N8e
two

[loshia]

WTF with latest executable?

Code:

D:\RelayNetwork>relaynetworkclient.exe
Assertion failed: connection.cpp:78

D:\RelayNetwork>relaynetworkclient.exe --help
UASsAsGeEr:t iDo:n\ failed: connection.cReplpa:y7N8e
two

Wtf dude M$ crap
.....

[Matt Corallo]

WTF with latest executable?

Should be fixed now.

[amaclin]

WTF with latest executable?

Should be fixed now.

Now it does not start at all  
Windows 7x64

What stable build can be used?

[Matt Corallo]

Now it does not start at all  
Windows 7x64

What stable build can be used?

Well, I told you I fixed your original bug :p. Sadly, I dont have any Windows boxes anywhere to test with, and it works in wine now....So you get not prints when you try to run it, and it also doesnt run when you specify your local bitcoind (ie "relaynetworkclient.exe my-bitcoind-address 8333")?

[amaclin]

Well, I told you I fixed your original bug :p. Sadly, I dont have any Windows boxes anywhere to test with, and it works in wine now....So you get not prints when you try to run it, and it also doesnt run when you specify your local bitcoind (ie "relaynetworkclient.exe my-bitcoind-address 8333")?

When I execute it with parameters it prints some garbage.
And few seconds later windows halts the program.
(Sorry, the Windows displays dialog box in Russian)

[Matt Corallo]

When I execute it with parameters it prints some garbage.
And few seconds later windows halts the program.
(Sorry, the Windows displays dialog box in Russian)

Strange that it prints garbage to start, but that does actually look like its working. Wait 30 seconds and see if it prints a bunch of messages about transactions received/sent?

[amaclin]

Strange that it prints garbage to start, but that does actually look like its working. Wait 30 seconds and see if it prints a bunch of messages about transactions received/sent?

And few seconds later windows halts the program.
The message in the dialog box means that windows have closed the program

[Matt Corallo]

If people could update to at least include https://github.com/TheBlueMatt/RelayNode/commit/6c479374f1f7f9a9338b656f8d5baa45d91e7d2c in their build, it would help a lot...when people start spamming the network the b/w usage on the relay servers spikes to much higher than reasonable, which may cause most servers to use more b/w than their monthly allotment.

It has no effect on the effectiveness of the relay network, and is almost entirely redundant.