As some of you may have noticed, I have worked on my own implementation of a bitcoin node. During this process I found things, which I would like to point out, so maybe they could be improved in a future...
Basically, they are all network bandwidth wasting related.
1. [EDIT: never mind]
Maybe I have not verified it well enough, but I have an impression that the original client, whenever it sends "getblocks", it always asks as deep as possible - why to do this? It just creates unnecessary traffic. You can surely optimize it, without much effort.
2. [EDIT: never mind]
IMO, you should also optimize the way you do "getdata".
Don't just send getdata for all the block that you don't know, to all the peers at the same time - it's crazy.
Instead, try to i.e. ask each node for a different block - one at a time, until you collect them all...
3. [EDIT: please, do mind]
Last, but not least.
The blocks are getting bigger, but there have been no improvements to the protocol, whatsoever.
You cannot i.e. ask a peer for a part of a block - you just need to download the whole 1MB of it from a single IP.
Moreover, each block has an exact hash, so it is just stupid that in times when even MtGox API goes through CloudFlare to save bandwidth, there is no solution that would allow a node to just download a block from an HTTP server, and so it is forced to leech it from the poor, mostly DSL armed, peers.
The way I see it, the solution would be very simple: every mining pool can easily use CloudFlare (or any other cloud service) to serve blocks via HTTP.
So if my node says "getdata ...", I do not necessarily mean that I want to have this megabyte of data from the poor node and its thin DSL connection. I would be more than happy to just get a URL, where I can download the block from - it surely would be faster, and would not drain the peer's uplink bandwidth that much.
That's about it, but if I recall something more, I will surely append it to this topic.
Also, please don't take my criticism personally - it's only meant as a feedback, pointing out areas that I think are important to improve, becasue the official bitcoin client is already eating up my internet connection more efficiently than BitTorrent, and that is very not cool
Basically, they are all network bandwidth wasting related.
1. [EDIT: never mind]
Maybe I have not verified it well enough, but I have an impression that the original client, whenever it sends "getblocks", it always asks as deep as possible - why to do this? It just creates unnecessary traffic. You can surely optimize it, without much effort.
2. [EDIT: never mind]
IMO, you should also optimize the way you do "getdata".
Don't just send getdata for all the block that you don't know, to all the peers at the same time - it's crazy.
Instead, try to i.e. ask each node for a different block - one at a time, until you collect them all...
3. [EDIT: please, do mind]
Last, but not least.
The blocks are getting bigger, but there have been no improvements to the protocol, whatsoever.
You cannot i.e. ask a peer for a part of a block - you just need to download the whole 1MB of it from a single IP.
Moreover, each block has an exact hash, so it is just stupid that in times when even MtGox API goes through CloudFlare to save bandwidth, there is no solution that would allow a node to just download a block from an HTTP server, and so it is forced to leech it from the poor, mostly DSL armed, peers.
The way I see it, the solution would be very simple: every mining pool can easily use CloudFlare (or any other cloud service) to serve blocks via HTTP.
So if my node says "getdata ...", I do not necessarily mean that I want to have this megabyte of data from the poor node and its thin DSL connection. I would be more than happy to just get a URL, where I can download the block from - it surely would be faster, and would not drain the peer's uplink bandwidth that much.
That's about it, but if I recall something more, I will surely append it to this topic.
Also, please don't take my criticism personally - it's only meant as a feedback, pointing out areas that I think are important to improve, becasue the official bitcoin client is already eating up my internet connection more efficiently than BitTorrent, and that is very not cool