Feature Request

Summary

Channel.RecentlySent is used for choosing priority of a channel. Currently channel selection is done as channel with the minimum channel.RecentlySent / channel.Priority ratio. Every packet message increases channel.RecentlySent by the proto-encoded packet size. channel.RecentlySent gets lowered by 20% at every UpdateStats window (which is just a 2 second timer).

BlockGossip is consensus time critical, and has very large packets. Its current priority weight is 10, vs vote's 7, hasVote's 1, and mempool's 5. Its packets are block parts which are large. This guarantees block gossip will always be the lowest prioritized packet out of all packets, since its recently sent will always be very large (in the 100kb's), which is problematic for fast block gossip. Any of the vote messages or mempool messages to a peer will outcompete block part gossip in the prioritization.

This matches behavior observed that we never hit our bandwidth flow rates in production and that block gossip just occurs slowly.

Instead channel.RecentlySent should first off be based on the number of packets on a channel, not the bandwidth size.

Problem Definition

This should greatly increase the prioritization of block gossip.

Proposal

channel.RecentlySent should first off be based on the number of packets on a channel, not the bandwidth size.