Performance, API and reliability

[Raynos]

/cc @dominictarr @juliangruber @substack

To build p2p browser apps I need a way to bootstrap a connection into the network. To do this I need a list of peers I can connect to so that I can get more information.

This is fundamentally important as I want a simple API I can build implementations of topologies and generally build all my higher level p2p libraries around.

• What is a good neutral API that could be replaced with alternative implementations.
• What are good ways to access a list of peers in a distributed fashion. Currently it's expected you make a scuttlebutt connection to a static IP which keeps the list in memory.
• What are good ways to reliably measure "presence" ?

If we can get this piece to be clean or at least have a well defined interface we can build higher level abstractions confirming to that interface.

Every p2p abstraction will need a bootstrapping list.

This current implementation is slow and unreliable but works barely.

[Raynos]

Feel free to /cc in anyone who would have a good opinion about this.

[juliangruber]

regarding the API I'd just rename the interval option to heartbeat or something like that. the rest looks good.

the list can be an r-array or crdt and as you said initially you just need someone to start replicating with.

measuring presence: with heartbeats and sending messages redundantly or retrying on failure things should work well.

[Raynos]

This is deprecated.

I'm way out of the loop for modular p2p. Other solutions are probably better.

[dominictarr]

I don't think this is something you can solve in general, instead target a particular pattern that helps you build a class of applications, like a DHT or something.