2021-11-15 19:57:00
Holochain Dev Pulse 107 : Testing Sharding
The past few Holochain releases have focused on both increasing resilience and adding features for developers.
One task is particularly important, even though you’ll probably never see or experience it — and in fact, its invisibility will be the proof of its success. Right now, the core dev team is doing extensive sharding tests, tuning parameters, adjusting the algorithm, and testing again. Currently, they’re investigating how peers respond to dramatic changes in their neighbourhood, such as many neighbours leaving at once or adjusting their arcs of responsibility.
What they’re seeing is that nodes respond very quickly to changes in their neighbourhood — which is great in principle, but such rapid responses are causing ‘oscillations’ that take a while to calm down. It’s a bit like when you meet someone coming toward you in a hallway, then you both try to make way for each other but end up moving in the same direction. So you readjust, get in each other’s way again, and repeat a few more times before you figure it out. That’s what’s happening at the DHT level, and the dev team is working on strategies to dampen those oscillations and allow nodes to reach stability after disruptions.
As regular readers know, sharding is Holochain’s long-term plan for building scalable peer-to-peer networks. Sharding is already built into Holochain, but it’s currently disabled by default. This testing and improvement work is getting it ready for real-world use.
Now let’s dig into what’s happened in the last three Holochain releases by reading the full Devpulse written by Paul here :
https://blog.holochain.org/testing-sharding/
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