Hi everyone, I will be using this thread to give weekly updates of what I am working on.
The big feature I am currently working on again is parallel IBD. It will improve the sync times of new nodes and nodes that have been offline by downloading and verifying the initial data from multiple peers instead of a single one. This project is pretty large and will require a significant amount of changes to the sync process. Earlier in the week I opened this PR, which streamlines the p2p code and is a preparation for the sync changes. More of these kind of PRs will follow in the coming time.
I am also currently in the process of rewriting the parallel IBD RFC, based on discussions in the PR and some tests I performed. In short, to avoid edge case scenarios and possible attack vectors, the sync will start off with a download and validation of the full utxo bitmap. The rewrite of the RFC is underway and I am expecting to publish a new WIP draft of it in the coming week. I am considering to limit the scope of the RFC to purely the p2p messages, meaning we likely will have a separate one that describes the required changes on the sync flow.
Since the project is fairly large, me and Antioch will both be working on it in parallel from different angles. My current objective is to have a fairly general implementation of generation and validation of the PIBD data to be sent over the wire, which we can then integrate into the node.
All in all I am excited to get this back on the road and implement this! I think it is an important feature and a fun challenge.
-Jasper