• Aaro Altonen's avatar
    Integrate litep2p into Polkadot SDK (#2944) · 80616f6d
    Aaro Altonen authored
    [litep2p](https://github.com/altonen/litep2p) is a libp2p-compatible P2P
    networking library. It supports all of the features of `rust-libp2p`
    that are currently being utilized by Polkadot SDK.
    
    Compared to `rust-libp2p`, `litep2p` has a quite different architecture
    which is why the new `litep2p` network backend is only able to use a
    little of the existing code in `sc-network`. The design has been mainly
    influenced by how we'd wish to structure our networking-related code in
    Polkadot SDK: independent higher-levels protocols directly communicating
    with the network over links that support bidirectional backpressure. A
    good example would be `NotificationHandle`/`RequestResponseHandle`
    abstractions which allow, e.g., `SyncingEngine` to directly communicate
    with peers to announce/request blocks.
    
    I've tried running `polkadot --network-backend litep2p` with a few
    different peer configurations and there is a noticeable reduction in
    networking CPU usage. For high load (`--out-peers 200`), networking CPU
    usage goes down from ~110% to ~30% (80 pp) and for normal load
    (`--out-peers 40`), the usage goes down from ~55% to ~18% (37 pp).
    
    These should not be taken as final numbers because:
    
    a) there are still some low-hanging optimization fruits, such as
    enabling [receive window
    auto-tuning](https://github.com/libp2p/rust-yamux/pull/176
    
    ), integrating
    `Peerset` more closely with `litep2p` or improving memory usage of the
    WebSocket transport
    b) fixing bugs/instabilities that incorrectly cause `litep2p` to do less
    work will increase the networking CPU usage
    c) verification in a more diverse set of tests/conditions is needed
    
    Nevertheless, these numbers should give an early estimate for CPU usage
    of the new networking backend.
    
    This PR consists of three separate changes:
    * introduce a generic `PeerId` (wrapper around `Multihash`) so that we
    don't have use `NetworkService::PeerId` in every part of the code that
    uses a `PeerId`
    * introduce `NetworkBackend` trait, implement it for the libp2p network
    stack and make Polkadot SDK generic over `NetworkBackend`
      * implement `NetworkBackend` for litep2p
    
    The new library should be considered experimental which is why
    `rust-libp2p` will remain as the default option for the time being. This
    PR currently depends on the master branch of `litep2p` but I'll cut a
    new release for the library once all review comments have been
    addresses.
    
    ---------
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAlexandru Vasile <[email protected]>
    Co-authored-by: default avatarDmitry Markin <[email protected]>
    Co-authored-by: default avatarAlexandru Vasile <[email protected]>
    Co-authored-by: default avatarAlexandru Vasile <[email protected]>
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