> From: Saint Wenhao > Even if my Internet speed may be > better than that, then still: it is limited by what my peers can provide.
This is a reasonable assumption, but it is not correct. P2P download speed is limited only by your bandwidth, not that of your peers. If you have extra capacity you add more peers. You drop the slower peers and connect to the faster peers - the ones offering capacity. You use standard deviation to detect which peers are slow. This will rapidly saturate your bandwidth, and is optimal for the P2P network. Your node may be pounding away at someone's laptop until timeout because the node software doesn't work this way. That's an implementation issue. > And if I check 10 connected nodes, and all use NETWORK_LIMITED flag, so all > are in pruned mode, and all just act as proxies, fetching blocks from other full, > archival nodes, then guess what: it is limited to the weakest link, the slowest > node in the chain of connections. This isn't how the protocol works. Addresses are advertised with their service bits. A node attempting to download blocks should not be connecting to a pruned peer. This is why this service bit exists. This is also why pruning is not good for the network. In 12 years of writing node software I have never seen peers produce a download limit. The chain can be consistently downloaded at the theoretical limit based on own bandwidth. We commonly operate from 1-2.5 Gbps and peers are never limiting. > Also, I understand, why full, archival nodes, use rate limits: because > otherwise, they would pay more bandwidth fees, if everyone would be able to > get everything instantly, at full speed. Which is why when many people limit > their connections, to not share too much data too fast, it is what it is. And it is > normal, because nodes are not rewarded for their services, so they have no > incentive to provide more, than the bare minimum they can handle. Throttling is not a problem for the same reasons discussed above. Download time is local bandwidth limited, not peer limited. If you are downloading at a rate below your available bandwidth it is either because your hardware cannot keep up with your available bandwidth, or the software is not designed to. Finally, I posted example bandwidths and related times over five and ten year periods to show the strongly declining relative trend despite strongly increasing data. There is no need anecdoting about bandwidth. It's easily obtained public information and a straightforward process to determine download time from these numbers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Internet_connection_speeds > It shows around 1 MB/s in the "Network Traffic" tab from the GUI client. This is about 1/5 of an Eritrean mobile phone, the slowest mobile rate on Earth, or 1/4 of a Cuban land line, the slowest wire rate on Earth. Seems like there's more going on here than bandwidth, but it is not caused by peers. Best, Eric -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Bitcoin Development Mailing List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/bitcoindev/1c46393e-ab63-47f3-b0c5-4e79cfb6696dn%40googlegroups.com.
