go-ethereum/p2p
Csaba Kiraly 33785aab21
p2p/discover: document BFS choice, add RandomWorkers split
Two related changes to CrawlIterator:

(1) Add a file-level commentary block explaining why the iterator uses a
FIFO queue (BFS over the FINDNODE-response graph) and what it is *not*
suitable for (target-directed lookup -- use RandomNodes() / the alpha=3
lookup iterator for that). The choice was inherited from dcrawl.nim
without explicit reasoning; making it visible avoids future readers
re-deriving the survey-vs-lookup distinction.

The BFS rationale is two-fold:

 - Coverage: BFS reaches every peer within N hops of the seeds in
   order, so a time-bounded run produces a representative sample of the
   reachable graph rather than a deep tendril through one sub-region.
 - Adversarial resilience: a peer returning malicious "neighbour"
   claims, dead-end peers, or eclipse-style sub-graphs cannot
   monopolise the worker pool, because pending work from other branches
   sits ahead of the attacker's responses in the queue. DFS would
   amplify each of these attacks.

(2) Add a RandomWorkers field to CrawlOptions. Of the Workers-sized
worker pool, the first (Workers - RandomWorkers) workers pop the FIFO
front (BFS), while RandomWorkers workers pop a uniform-random queue
index via swap-and-pop (O(1)). Total worker count is unchanged.

Default RandomWorkers = Workers / 4 (4 of 16 with the default
parallelism). At this ratio:

 - Cold-start cost is negligible: 12 of 16 workers still drain FIFO,
   so the first ~1s of a fresh crawl behaves like pure BFS.
 - 25% of pops break strict FIFO ordering, providing a mild
   anti-fingerprint defence against an attacker who could otherwise
   predict our processing order from the contents of their own
   FINDNODE responses.

Operators can override per-run via the new --random-workers CLI flag
on `devp2p discv4 crawl` and `discv5 crawl`. Negative value forces
pure BFS; positive value selects an explicit count.

The new TestCrawlIteratorRandomWorkers covers four pop-policy
configurations (all-fifo, all-random, half-half, default) and
asserts the iterator still terminates and emits each node exactly
once in each.
2026-05-07 14:41:58 +02:00
..
discover p2p/discover: document BFS choice, add RandomWorkers split 2026-05-07 14:41:58 +02:00
dnsdisc crypto/keccak: vendor in golang.org/x/crypto/sha3 (#33323) 2026-02-03 14:55:27 -07:00
enode crypto/keccak: vendor in golang.org/x/crypto/sha3 (#33323) 2026-02-03 14:55:27 -07:00
enr p2p/enode: add quic ENR entry (#30283) 2024-09-13 23:47:18 +02:00
msgrate p2p: using math.MaxInt32 from go std lib (#32357) 2025-08-20 16:22:21 -06:00
nat p2p/nat: fix err shadowing in UPnP addAnyPortMapping (#33355) 2025-12-08 15:02:24 +01:00
netutil p2p: using testing.B.Loop (#32664) 2025-09-19 16:38:36 -06:00
pipes all: update license comments and AUTHORS (#31133) 2025-02-05 23:01:17 +01:00
rlpx crypto/keccak: vendor in golang.org/x/crypto/sha3 (#33323) 2026-02-03 14:55:27 -07:00
tracker p2p/tracker: fix crash in clean when tracker is stopped (#33940) 2026-03-03 12:54:24 +01:00
config.go p2p: update MaxPeers comment (#32414) 2025-08-19 20:14:11 +08:00
config_toml.go p2p: support configuring NAT in TOML file (#31041) 2025-01-22 09:29:34 +01:00
dial.go p2p: track in-progress inbound node IDs (#33198) 2026-03-20 05:52:15 +01:00
dial_test.go p2p: track in-progress inbound node IDs (#33198) 2026-03-20 05:52:15 +01:00
message.go p2p: use atomic types (#27764) 2023-08-01 23:20:52 +02:00
message_test.go p2p: move rlpx into separate package (#21464) 2020-09-22 10:17:39 +02:00
metrics.go p2p: add metrics for inbound connection errors (#31652) 2025-05-07 15:34:52 +02:00
peer.go p2p: remove todo comment, as it's unnecessary (#32397) 2025-08-21 15:48:46 -06:00
peer_error.go p2p: fix DiscReason encoding/decoding (#30855) 2024-12-12 12:33:42 +01:00
peer_test.go p2p: DNS resolution for static nodes (#30822) 2024-12-13 12:46:12 +01:00
protocol.go all: use cmp.Compare (#30958) 2025-01-02 14:06:47 +01:00
server.go p2p: track in-progress inbound node IDs (#33198) 2026-03-20 05:52:15 +01:00
server_nat.go p2p/nat: fix UPnP port reset (#31566) 2025-04-09 11:28:29 +02:00
server_nat_test.go p2p: fix flaky test TestServerPortMapping (#30241) 2024-07-30 07:31:27 -06:00
server_test.go p2p: cleanup v4 if v5 failed (#33005) 2025-10-29 10:34:19 +01:00
transport.go p2p: fix DiscReason encoding/decoding (#30855) 2024-12-12 12:33:42 +01:00
transport_test.go p2p: fix DiscReason encoding/decoding (#30855) 2024-12-12 12:33:42 +01:00
util.go all: assign zero after resize in implementations of heap.Interface (#26296) 2022-12-05 13:49:54 +01:00
util_test.go p2p: new dial scheduler (#20592) 2020-02-13 11:10:03 +01:00