Previously when a peer restarted, information about the new
incarnation (i.e. with a different UID) was not accepted by other
peers (and connections would be dropped) unless all knowledge of the
previous incarnation had been purged. This could result in a lot of
connection churn and hence connectivity disruption, and, in some
pathological cases, very slow convergence and hence acceptance of the
new incarnation into the network.
We now no longer drop connections when encountering different
incarnations of a peer. There are two situations when that can happen:
1) on connection establishment
we simply proceed
2) on receipt of gossip
to ensure convergence we
a) treat the UID as an additional discriminator when deciding whether
we should update our information about a peer with that which was
gossiped. Specifically, we update the information we hold when a) the
gossiped version is greater, or b) is the same and the UID is
greater.
b) include the UID in the information we update
c) move our own version number beyond any we receive for ourselves, if
the received UID differs from ours.
With (a) we establishes a total order of peer information across
several incarnations of the same peer. i.e. we consider information to
be fresher if it has a higher version, or the same version and higher
UID. This may seem somewhat counter intutive, since it will generally
treat information about new incarnations as older than old
incarnations, since incarnations always start life with version 1. But
to do better we'd need to establish a total order of incarnations that
matches their temporal occurrence. Which requires some sort of durable
state.
So instead we have (c). Through that we learn the highest version
number of any old incarnation of ourselves that other peers still
hold, and then make sure that our version is greater than
that. Essentially we continue where the old incarnations left
off. It's as if instead of restarting we had simply changed UIDs. And
due to (a) and (b) the information about the new incarnation of
ourselves, now with a higher version, will supersede that of the old
incarnations.
Fixes#1554.
Matthias Radestock
bfb050c9cc