What is Oxen?
Why buy $OXEN?
How do I stake $OXEN?
Who uses Oxen?
What can be built?
Session & Lokinet
Get involved
Roadmap
FAQ
Weekly Dev Update #153

Weekly Dev Update #153

01 June 2021Kee Jefferys

Hey y’all, 

This week the Session team put a heavy focus on Session Android performance, particularly on issues that affect Session when it is opened and needs to load many conversations at once. The Lokinet team focused on a path handover issue which is causing connection instability. The Oxen core team finished a big update to the Oxen storage server which should speed up the process of fetching messages from the storage server. 

Oxen

Oxen Core

Oxen Storage server 

- Remove pre-HF18 legacy code/endpoints that isn't being called anymore

- Remove process_lns_request endpoint (it is broken, and Session clients have already switched to using oxend_rpc with ons_resolve instead).

- Replace boost beast http(s) client code with cpr (https://github.com/whoshuu/cpr); this is a whole lot nicer to use for HTTP requests.

- Replace boost beast http server code with uWebSockets (https://github.com/uNetworking/uWebSockets). This gives a much nicer interface, and makes it easy for us to add websocket support for clients in the future.

- Remove boost::asio; it's not needed anymore with the removal of the above.

- Replace bootstrap RPC code with authenticated, encrypted OMQ RPC.

- Remove boost circular buffer use; a regular map with a two-line trim is simpler for the block hash cache and a limit on stored snodes doesn't seem necessary for the rate limiter.

- Make rate_limiter clean itself periodically rather than keeping buckets around indefinitely

- Make rate_limiter thread-safe so that you don't need to hold the entire service_node_ lock to use it.

- Remove ip_utils; we don't allow redirects and are sufficiently restrictive on the URL target that it seems unnecessary (plus not having it lets us offload DNS lookup to curl as part of the request).

- Replace /swarms/ping_test/v1 with /ping_test/v1; this new request now returns the remote pubkey in a header, and no longer includes an SSL cert signature (so that we can drop the SSL cert signatures after HF19). The old one will still be used until HF19.

- Add OMQ endpoint for storage tests; starting at HF19 it will get used rather than the HTTPS one.

- Refactor storage test retries into request_handler (rather than being in the HTTPS specific code)

- Move HTTPS server-specific code for validating snode signatures from headers out of generic request_handler code and into HTTPS-specific code.

- Make onion proxy-to-url timeout a bit less than the onion request timeout so that the client has a better chance of getting a relayed timeout error (rather than getting a timeout from the edge node).

- Miscellaneous cleanups.

- Logger: use file and line number instead of func because the latter is nearly useless when called from a lambda.

- Shorten timeout values for ping tests, storage tests, and bootstrap connections to 5s, 15s, and 10s, respectively, from.

- Refactor recent stats reporting to use rolling averages that always have 60-70min of stats and drop off 10min at a time, rather than the 1-period hard reset. Also fixes various stats that weren't calculated/reported properly.

- Add onion and proxy requests to systemd status line as well as used database size.

- Enable WAL for sqlite3 database

- Removed buffered message relaying for swarm propagation; it's counterproductive with omq's persistent connections.

- Enable jemalloc by default.

Oxen Mobile Wallet 

Lokinet

This week was spent tracking down Lokinet connectivity issues. We’ve narrowed the problem down to a longstanding issue in path handover (i.e. when one path expires and Lokinet builds and switches to a new path, which is meant to happen seamlessly every few minutes).  0.9.x included various improvements to better detect failing paths, but these appear to have exposed a lurking bug that has been present for quite some time; fixing this to ensure a smoother Lokinet experience is currently our top priority.

Session

Session Android 

Session Desktop 

Session iOS

Thanks,

Kee

You've got mail!

Sign up to our newsletter to keep up to date with everything Oxen.