Over time we've seen our gossip quality degrade as the network has become larger. Quite suddenly, we
crossed some threshold and gossip has become untenable without changes. libp2p groups, the
abstraction that our consensus and dkg are built upon, are taking longer and longer to converge,
leading to elections that don't complete, and occasionally to chain stalls. This emergency release
speeds up gossip dissemination by increasing the number of peers to gossip per gossip round, and
changes the seed node connection strategy to only connect to two seed nodes, rather than all of
them. At the same time, we're increasing the number of seed nodes to deal with overload.
Content
- Tweak libp2p gossip strategies: PR: libp2p/233
Deployment Plan
We'll plan a quick beta roll-out of release 2019.12.19.0 to ensure the firmware build went
properly and then release the firmware to all Hotspots.