The bugs have by now been fixed in the original implementation, this fork is now outdated and shouldn't be used anymore!
Use this instead.
This is just a fork implementing some bugfixes.
Original description:
LightDHT - A lightweight python implementation of the Bittorrent distributed hashtable.
The aim of LightDHT is to provide a simple, flexible implementation of the Bittorrent DHT for use in research applications. If you want to trade files, you have come to the wrong place. LightDHT does not implement the actual file transfer parts of the bittorrent protocol. It only takes part in the DHT.
Philosophy:
- Ease of use over performance
- Adaptability over scalability
In order to keep LightDHT easy to use, all DHT RPC calls are performed synchronously. This means that when you call a DHT method, your program will block until you have an answer to your request. That answer will be the return value of the function. This has the advantage that it keeps the logical program flow intact, and makes it more comfortable to use.
In order to maintain O(log N) scaling across the network, BEP0005 (the standard governing the DHT) mandates that implementations use a bucket-based approach to the routing table. This enables the node to fulfill all requests in constant time and (more or less) constant memory. In LightDHT, we throw that recommendation to the wind.
Since the main focus of LightDHT is reseach, we are going to keep around all the data we can. This means that we keep around every single node we know about. Since in practice the number of nodes is limited and the request rates are rather low, we do not bother keeping the routing table organized in a tree structure for quick lookups. Instead we keep it in a dictionary and sort on-demand. The performance penalty is well worth the reduced complexity of the implementation, and the flexibility of having all nodes in an easy to use data structure.