Clarification Needed: Calculation of Delivery Delay and Delivery Rate

[sarvalabs-karthik]

Even though Hermes connects to as many nodes as possible, as specified by the max parameter, it only receives messages from a subset of the total nodes that have the Hermes client in their mesh. This behavior leads to two significant challenges:

1. Incomplete Delivery Verification:

   • Since Hermes does not receive messages from all nodes, it is unclear whether the message has reached every node in the network. This makes it difficult to confirm full message propagation.

2. Uncertain Delivery Delay Measurement:

   • Due to the subset-based reception, the time taken from the original producer of the message to the last receiver cannot be accurately measured. Hermes only tracks the delay for the messages it receives, which may not represent the overall network delay.

[cortze]

Hey @sarvalabs-karthik, you are theoretically right: a single Hermes instance would just have a small representation of the propagation of a message. However, our objective is to run multiple Hermes instances in different geo locations to increase the number of data points for each message and better shape the message propagation distribution.

[sarvalabs-karthik]

Thanks for the clarification.