Since block validation happens in parallel, multiple threads may be
accessing the signature cache simultaneously. To prevent contention:
* Turn the signature cache lock into a shared mutex
* Make reading from the cache only acquire a shared lock
* Let block validations not store their results in the cache
* During block verification (when parallelism is requested), script
check actions are stored instead of being executed immediately.
* After every processed transactions, its signature actions are
pushed to a CScriptCheckQueue, which maintains a queue and some
synchronization mechanism.
* Two or more threads (if enabled) start processing elements from
this queue,
* When the block connection code is finished processing transactions,
it joins the worker pool until the queue is empty.
As cs_main is held the entire time, and all verification must be
finished before the block continues processing, this does not reach
the best possible performance. It is a less drastic change than
some more advanced mechanisms (like doing verification out-of-band
entirely, and rolling back blocks when a failure is detected).
The -par=N flag controls the number of threads (1-16). 0 means auto,
and is the default.
- ensure we use strCaption for printf and fprintf, as before it could
happen to have an error message in the debug.log, which had no "Error"
(or whatever) in front
- this prevents an interference with the IPC message queue (which is used
for URI processing) when running a testnet and mainnet instance in
parallel
- to check for testnet, I had to raise the ParseParameters() call in
main() to the topmost position
- a click on "Reset Options" sets all options to the default values by
removing all stored settings (QSettings), loading the defaults and
saving them as the new settings
- before the reset is executed the user is presented a confirmation dialog
- special casing was needed for StartAtStartup
- some users reported it as weird, that the estimated block count could be
lower than our own nodes block number (which is indeed true and not good)
- this pull adds a new default behaviour, which displays our own block
number as estimated block number, if own >= est. block count
- the pull raises space for nodes block counts in cPeerBlockCounts to 8 to
be more accurate
- also removes a reduntant setNumBlocks() call in RPCConsole and moves
initialisation of numBlocksAtStartup in ClientModel, where it belongs
-checklevel gets a new meaning:
0: verify blocks can be read from disk (like before)
1: verify (contextless) block validity (like before)
2: verify undo files can be read and have good checksums
3: verify coin database is consistent with the last few blocks
(close to level 6 before)
4: verify all validity rules of the last few blocks
Level 3 is the new default, as it's reasonably fast. As level 3 and
4 are implemented using an in-memory rollback of the database, they
are limited to as many blocks as possible without exceeding the
limits set by -dbcache. The default of -dbcache=25 allows for some
150-200 blocks to be rolled back.
In case an error is found, the application quits with a message
instructing the user to restart with -reindex. Better instructions,
and automatic recovery (when possible) or automatic reindexing are
left as future work.
Initialize the OutputDebugStringF mutex and file pointer using
boost::call_once, to be thread-safe.
Make the return value of OutputDebugStringF really be the number of
characters written (*printf() semantics).
Declare the fReopenDebugLog flag volatile, since it is changed from
a signal handler.
And don't declare OutputDebugStringF() as inline.
If the user was really after the fastest possible confirmation times
they would be manually setting a fee. In cases where the wallet builds
a transaction with a priority that is too low to qualify as free until
the next block, go ahead without a fee. Confirmation frequently takes
multiple blocks even when a minimum fee is provided.
