Previously mission control tracked failures on a per node, per channel basis.
This commit changes this to tracking on the level of directed node pairs. The goal
of moving to this coarser-grained level is to reduce the number of required
payment attempts without compromising payment reliability.
The current approach iterates all channels in the graph in order to
filter those in need. This approach is time consuming, several seconds
on my mobile device for ~40,000 channels, while during this time the
db is locked in a transaction.
The proposed change is to use an existing functionality that utilize the
fact that channel update are saved indexed by date. This method enables
us to go over only a small subset of the channels, only those that
were updated before the "channel expiry" time and further filter
them for our need.
The same graph that took several seconds to prune was pruned, after
the change, in several milliseconds.
In addition for testing purposes I added Initiator field to the
testChannel structure to reflect the channeldEdgePolicy direction.
If nodes return a channel policy related failure, they may get a second
chance. Our graph may not be up to date. Previously this logic was
contained in the payment session.
This commit moves that into global mission control and thereby removes
the last mission control state that was kept on the payment level.
Because mission control is not aware of the relation between payment
attempts and payments, the second chance logic is no longer based
tracking second chances given per payment.
Instead a time based approach is used. If a node reports a policy
failure that prevents forwarding to its peer, it will get a second
chance. But it will get it only if the previous second chance was
long enough ago.
Also those second chances are no longer dependent on whether an
associated channel update is valid. It will get the second chance
regardless, to prevent creating a dependency between mission control and
the graph. This would interfer with (future) replay of history, because
the graph may not be the same anymore at that point.
This commit moves the call to PruneGraph outside of the loop
that collates all of the spentOutputs. With this change, if
a node has been offline for a long period of time, resyncing
with the chain no longer takes up as much memory (1MB vs 200MB
in some cases) or time. Previously, PruneGraph was called
for every block and allocated a very large map further down
in the pruneGraphNodes function. Now, pruneGraphNodes is only
called once.
Since nilling the pubkey curve will lead to a nil-pointer exception if
the key is later used for signature verification, we make sure to make a
copy before nilling and spewing.
This commit moves the default timeout out of router and thereby fixes a
bug that caused SendToRoute to not return the actual error, but a
timeout result instead. SendToRoute only tries a single route, so a
timeout should never happen.
Previously we would mistakenly use the payment value from the dummy
LightningPayment struct, which would obviously be 0 always. Now we
instead calculate the value from the given route.
Previously every payment had its own local mission control state which
was in effect only for that payment. In this commit most of the local
state is removed and payments all tap into the global mission control
probability estimator.
Furthermore the decay time of pruned edges and nodes is extended, so
that observations about the network can better benefit future payment
processes.
Last, the probability function is transformed from a binary output to a
gradual curve, allowing for a better trade off between candidate routes.
This commit makes the router use the ControlTower to drive the payment
life cycle state machine, to keep track of active payments across
restarts. This lets the router resume payments on startup, such that
their final results can be handled and stored when ready.
This encapsulates all state needed to resume a payment from any point of
the payment flow, and that must be shared between the different stages
of the execution. This is done to prepare for breaking the send loop
into smaller parts, and being able to resume the payment from any point
from persistent state.
In this commit we move handing the deobfuscator from the router to the
switch from when the payment is initiated, to when the result is
queried.
We do this because only the router can recreate the deobfuscator after a
restart, and we are preparing for being able to handle results across
restarts.
Since the deobfuscator cannot be nil anymore, we can also get rid of
that special case.
This lets us distinguish an critical error from a actual payment result
(success or failure). This is important since we know that we can only
attempt another payment when a final result from the previous payment
attempt is received.