Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Building a node crawler to map network

From: Mike Hearn <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 6 Sep 2011 15:31:34 +0200

>
> I've looked but can't find a post like you're talking about.  Can you point
> me to it?
>

https://groups.google.com/forum/?pli=1#!topic/bitcoinj/LSlZdUWcCdk

> If so then bollocks... I'm looking for something useful to do atm.
>  PoolServerJ is in a holding pattern atm as I've stabilisied all the bugs I
> know about and am waiting for several pools to finish testing and move into
> production so I'm twiddling thumbs trying to figure out how to spend my
> time.
>

Patches to BitCoinJ are always welcome :-)

If you'd rather do your own thing, you could experiment with writing a proxy
that sits in front of bitcoind and multiplexes connections. Gavin is
concerned about socket exhaustion as users move to lightweight clients.
Multiplexing proxies are a battle-tested technique for reducing the strain
of this type of thing. BitCoinJ uses thread-per-connection so wouldn't do a
good job of that right now, but allowing it to use a mix of async io and
multi-threading would be a nice improvement. It'd need some changes to
bitcoind as well for a really good effort, to allow for IPs to be forwarded.
I'm happy to discuss it more with you over on the bitcoinj list if wanted.