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Gossip

For an introduction to Solana's gossip protocol, check out the technical sections of our Sig announcement blog post.

Check out the full associated blog post here: https://blog.syndica.io/sig-engineering-1-gossip-protocol/.

Repository File Outline​

The main gossip files are in src/gossip

  • service.zig: main logic for reading, processing, and sending gossip messages
  • table.zig: where gossip data is stored
  • data.zig: various gossip data structure definitions
  • pull_request.zig: logic for sending pull requests
  • pull_response.zig: logic for sending pull responses (/handling incoming pull requests)
  • gossip_shards.zig: data structure which stores gossip data hashes for quick lookup
  • active_set.zig: logic for deriving a list of peers to send push messages to
  • ping_pong.zig: logic for sending ping/pong messages as a heartbeat check

Benchmarks​

benchmarks are located at the bottom of service.zig.

to run the benchmarks:

  • build sig in ReleaseSafe (ie, zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseSafe)
  • run ./zig-out/bin/benchmark gossip

this includes processing times for pings, push messages, pull responses, and pull requests.

Benchmark                                  Iterations    Min(ms)    Max(ms)   Variance   Mean(ms)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
benchmarkGossipService(10k_ping_msgs)               1       1489       1489          0       1489
benchmarkGossipService(10k_push_msgs)               1      11811      11811          0      11811
benchmarkGossipService(10k_pull_resp_msgs)          1      11761      11761          0      11761

Benchmark                                   Iterations    Min(ms)    Max(ms)   Variance   Mean(ms)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
benchmarkPullRequests(1k_data_1k_pull_reqs)           1        528        528          0        528
benchmarkPullRequests(10k_data_1k_pull_reqs)          1        575        575          0        575

Fuzzing​

The fuzzing client is located in fuzz.zig.

See the contributing docs for instructions on how to run it.