The speed-derived child limit read a missing ratio as a refusal, so on any
server that never announces ParentSpeedRatio — soulfind among them — the
client carried no children at all, however it was configured. A ratio we
were never told is not a decision: the server's figures set the limit only
when it has given them, and otherwise the configured cap stands, which is
how slskd runs throughout. A speed below the announced minimum still means
none, which is the safety property the rule exists for.
Also stops repeating AcceptChildren: it is a standing state on the server,
so it goes out when the answer changes rather than on every message that
happens to prompt a recount.
Promotion already proved the promoted user is told; this pins the other
half — the roster the owner sees (code 143), and an operator standing
down of their own accord (147).
Three messages that were implemented and only encoder-tested: a member
giving up their own membership (136), an owner disbanding the room and
freeing its name (137), and a privileged account handing time to another
user (123), which the recipient then sees as privilege time of their own.
UserJoinedRoom and UserLeftRoom (codes 16 and 17) were parsed and applied
to the roster with nothing proving either end of that, which is the kind
of gap that only shows up when someone relies on it.
The client answered a UserInfoRequest but could never send one, so a
user's profile — description, upload slots, queue length — was something
this client served and never saw. The reply (peer code 16) is now parsed
too, with the tolerances other clients carry: a picture is skipped rather
than kept, a length that overruns the message is clamped, and a message
that stops early (older clients, and Museek+ writing a boolean as an
integer) still yields every field before it.
The child limit is derived from the upload speed the server records for
us, and the server pushes a user's stats to whoever watches that user —
so a client that does not watch itself never learns its own figure and
would carry the default cap forever. Nicotine+ reads the same number off
the stats the server sends about the logged-in user.
We now watch ourselves as each session starts, and the stats that come
back — the initial reply and every later push — set the figure the limit
is derived from. Client::own_average_speed exposes it.
The server holds interests only for the session that set them, so a client
that does not re-send its list comes back from a reconnect with none. That
is why Nicotine+ sends its whole list at every login, and why it lowercases
each item before sending — the server matches them case-insensitively, so
two spellings would otherwise be held as two interests.
Ours now keeps the list, in one spelling, and puts it back on the wire when
a session starts; an interest set before there is a connection is kept
rather than dropped. A room's ticker board is also let go when we leave the
room, since the server sends the whole board again on the next join.
Reading Nicotine+ and slskd against what was just written turned up three
places where this client had the message right and the behaviour wrong.
Excluded search phrases (code 160) are not a filter on the searches we
send — the server already drops those. Nicotine+ applies them to the files
it offers, leaving out any whose path carries an excluded phrase, and a
reply with nothing left is not sent. Ours now does the same, and the
local refusal of outgoing searches is gone.
Serving children now follows the same rules as Nicotine+: the limit comes
from the server's ParentMinSpeed and ParentSpeedRatio against the upload
speed the server records for us (capped at ten, none at all below the
minimum), children are refused until something feeds us the search stream
and let go when it stops, a second link from a child we already carry is
refused, and AcceptChildren is re-sent whenever that answer changes. Where
the server has never reported our speed there is nothing to apply the
formula to, so the configured cap stands, which is how slskd runs.
Queued downloads now ask where they sit every five minutes, as Nicotine+
does, instead of only when a caller asks; a brokered file connection we
cannot complete reports CantConnectToPeer like a control connection does;
and a peer's shares can be asked for one folder at a time (peer code 36
and its reply, 37), which is what "download folder" is built on.
The client read the distributed network but never carried it: a peer
dialling with a D connection was logged and dropped, and AcceptChildren
was hardcoded false, so this client took from the tree without ever
relaying a search for anyone else.
With accept_children set, peers hang from us: each is told where our
branch sits when it connects and again when the branch moves, every
search that reaches us is passed down, and a child that goes away loses
its slot. Ten at a time, matching Nicotine+, since each costs a socket
and a copy of the network's whole search stream — which is also why it is
opt-in, through the new accept_children config key (ignored without a
listener, since a child would have nothing to dial).
Two bugs an e2e test found the moment one existed for this path.
A private message the server held while we were offline arrives with
new_message false, and the handler only acknowledged the ones flagged
new — so exactly the messages that need an ack never got one and the
server re-delivered them at every login, forever. Every delivery is now
acknowledged.
A dropped Client also left its server connection open, so the session
lived on: mail addressed to us went to a socket nobody was reading and a
later login collided with our own ghost. Client::disconnect closes the
server and peer connections, and Drop calls it.
Also covers two features that were never driven end to end: an offline
message delivered once and not again, and a wishlist search answered like
any other.
Private rooms were unreachable: the client could ask to join one but had
no way to invite, promote, resign or be told what happened, and a room
name already owned by someone else came back as silence rather than a
refusal (code 1003).
Adds the rosters the server pushes after login (133/148), the changes it
narrates to them (134/135, 143/144), our own standing (139/140, 145/146),
and the messages that drive them, with the rosters kept current in client
state. The daemon protocol and the TUI room transcript carry the new
events rather than dropping them.
Three features the client half-had. SetStatus (28) was only ever sent as
"online" at login, so there was no way to go away; excluded search phrases
(160) were parsed and logged into nowhere, so every client kept spending
searches on queries the server was never going to answer; and a queued
download could answer a peer asking about its place but could never ask
about its own.
Each is now driven end to end: the away status seen by another user, a
refused query on a stub server that announces phrases (soulfind keeps its
filters in a database the suite cannot seed), and a peer's answer landing
on the download as its queue position.
Eleven scenarios over a real server: tickers reaching other members and
the board handed to a late joiner, the global room feed starting and
stopping, user and room searches answered by their targets, interests
driving similar users and recommendations, a password change taking
effect on the next login, one message reaching several users, and a
brokered dial we cannot complete reporting CantConnectToPeer to the peer
that is waiting on it.
Adds the server messages the client had no way to speak: user and room
search (42/120), room tickers (113-116), the global room feed (150-152),
interests and the recommendation queries built on them (51/52/54/56/57/
110/111/112/117/118), a keepalive ping (32), gifted privileges (123), a
password change (142) and multi-user private messages (149).
CantConnectToPeer (1001) closes a real gap in both directions: a dial the
server asked us to make now answers the waiting peer instead of falling
back to brokering the same unreachable link the other way, and an incoming
one ends the wait on downloads queued for that peer rather than letting
them sit until a timeout.
A candidate that accepted the dial and then said nothing kept its slot
for the session, and ten of those blocked every later batch; a link now
closes after a minute of silence. A parent that flaps its level made us
tell the server four messages per flap; moves are now told at most once
a second, the latest one winning. A parent that reports level zero is
its own root from then on, whatever it said before. The wait for a
searcher's control connection runs from the last message queued for it,
not the first. A successful login is pinned to reset the leaf.
Review of the leaf found the seams a stranger on the other end of a D
connection could pull at, and a few that a slow one would.
- A code-93 envelope is unwrapped once, as Nicotine+ does; a frame made
of nothing but envelopes used to recurse once per byte.
- A branch level is validated before it is used: negative levels leave
the candidate unadoptable and the largest one no longer overflows.
- The link reads through the crate's MessageReader, so a frame split
across a read timeout is no longer torn or mistaken for a closed link.
- Every event a link raises carries its link number, so a stale thread
cannot adopt, close or move a newer link to the same user.
- Later branch facts from the parent move our own place and are told to
the server; a fresh login resets the leaf, whose stance is now the one
place the four announcement messages come from.
- Candidates from a later batch join the ones in flight instead of
cancelling them, capped at ten; searches from the parent are budgeted
at fifty a second; a reply queued for a searcher the server cannot
place expires after a minute.
- Truncated frames and half-read PossibleParents entries are dropped
instead of yielding an empty root, a level of zero or a phantom
candidate.
The e2e now has a searcher of its own, so the answer must go to whoever
asked and not to the parent that relayed it.
The server hands every client a list of possible parents and expects it to
hang from one so searches also travel peer to peer. Until now we told the
server we were a lone root and left it at that, which the network tolerates
but does not favour.
A leaf now dials each PossibleParents candidate over a D connection, adopts
the first that passes a search down after stating its branch, announces the
new branch root and level to the server, and answers those searches the same
way as ones from the server. Losing the parent or a ResetDistributed puts it
back to a parentless stance. The leaf takes no children.
The Leaf state machine is pure so its rules are unit-tested without sockets;
the e2e test drives a real client from a mock parent, since soulfind never
hands out parents.
The distributed search network carries searches from parent to child
over connections whose frames have a one-byte code; the library had no
reader for them. This adds the codec for Search, BranchLevel,
BranchRoot and the embedded envelope, with the identifier check that
keeps malformed frames from being answered, and completes the post-login
stance Nicotine+ sends: HaveNoParent, BranchRoot (ourselves),
BranchLevel 0 and AcceptChildren false, in place of HaveNoParent alone.
Every release since 14 has been a major, because the actor mailboxes,
the share index's struct and the CLI's command enum were all exhaustive
public API: adding a peer message, a scanned field or a subcommand read
as a breaking change to the library. The actors, dispatcher, peer
plumbing and download store are how the client is built, not what a host
programs against, so they move inside the crate; PeerMessage, SharedFile
and the CLI command enums are non-exhaustive; ConnectionType is
re-exported at the root for the one thing hosts used it for. A one-time
break so that the next additions are not.
A browse listed each file as a name and a size, so a searcher who saw a
bitrate in a search reply lost it the moment they opened the sharer's
files. Listings (codes 5 and 37) now carry each file's attributes the
way Nicotine+ sends them, as a SharedFileEntry with name, size and
attributes in place of the (name, size) pair; the CLI's browse record
gains bitrate and duration, and the daemon protocol moves to version 2
for the new listing shape.
The tag's length was subtracted twice from the audio length when the
tag fit in the first read, and not at all when it did not, so durations
came out short or long by the tag; a frame with the protection bit
clear carries a two-byte CRC before its side info, which put the Xing
block two bytes off; and a Xing block without a frame count threw the
whole file's attributes away instead of falling back to the frame
header. Each has a test now.
Every search reply we sent carried no bitrate or duration, so our files
failed every bitrate filter in other clients and sorted last in
SoulseekQt, whatever their quality. The share scan now reads each MP3's
first frame header (and Xing block for variable bitrate) and each FLAC's
STREAMINFO, advertising bitrate, duration, VBR, sample rate and bit
depth as far as the format gives them; other files stay bare. Only the
file's head is read, no crate is needed, and a file that does not parse
is shared without attributes rather than skipped.
Draining several buffers a tick meant a reply and the close after it
could land in one call, and the close was acted on first: the reply sat
unparsed in the reader while the actor disconnected. Only the first read
of a drain reports an error now; the close is seen again on the next
tick, after the reply has been handled.
A Retire that reached an actor still dialling was queued behind the
connection and, if that dial then failed, never applied: nothing in the
registry pointed at the actor any more, so its thread lived on. Nothing
has gone out on a dial in progress, so retiring one closes it on the
spot.
A retired actor reads only from its tick, and one socket buffer a tick
is 10 KiB a second: a real share listing would outlast the grace. Every
actor now drains up to 64 buffers a tick.
The mock seeder drained every message but the TransferResponse while it
waited for the client to allow an upload, so a browse arriving in that
window was silently dropped and counted against the client.
Two connections to the same peer race whenever both sides dial at once:
we open one to send a browse, the peer opens one to deliver a search
reply. The registry keeps one actor per username, and until now stopped
the older one on the spot, which closed the socket carrying our browse
before the listing could arrive. Under load the stress gate lost up to
two thirds of its browses that way.
A replaced actor is now retired instead: it sends nothing new, keeps
reading for thirty seconds so a reply already on the wire still reaches
the client, and then stops itself. The peer closing a retired connection
is expected and reported as a clean close, so it cannot fail transfers
running on the connection that took over.
An upload offer counted against the slot cap until the peer accepted
it, and a peer that never answered, having gone away or hung, held that
slot for the life of the process; with two slots by default, two such
peers shut uploads down until a restart. An offer nobody answers within
thirty seconds is now dropped, recorded as a failed upload so the
operator sees why, and the slot goes to the next in line.
Every ceiling this project has hit only appeared under a mixed load, and
three of the four lost work silently while single-feature e2e stayed
green, yet the benchmark only ever ran by hand on one laptop. With
STRESS_REQUIRE_FUNCTIONAL=1 the stress example exits 1 when a download,
upload, search or browse was lost; throughput never fails it because it
measures the machine, not the client. CI now runs a quarter-size profile
against soulfind on every pull request.
The speed other users see for us in `user` lookups and in the server's
own ranking comes from SendUploadSpeed (code 121), which the client
never sent, so it read zero however much we served. Each completed
upload now reports its measured bytes per second, as Nicotine+ and
slskd do.
server_actor.rs had grown past twelve hundred lines, a fifth of them
tests and a hundred the value types it hands out. The types now live in
server_actor/types.rs and the tests in server_actor/tests.rs, as the
client's already do, and the room and user traffic in handle_message
moves to its own dispatch step beside the wishlist one. No behaviour
changes; the public paths are re-exported as before.
The level lived in a `static mut` read from every logging thread and
written by `init`, an unsynchronised access the compiler only tolerates
inside `unsafe`. It is an atomic now, read without `unsafe`, and a host
can raise or lower it while running through `set_log_level`.
An AdminMessage (server code 66) is how a server tells everyone it is
going down, and the client dropped it on the floor. It now arrives in
the private-message inbox as a message from the user "server", which is
also the name the server's own command replies already come from, so
every reader of that inbox shows it without a new API.
A browse or folder listing and a search reply went out as zlib "stored"
blocks, so a big share cost every browser its full uncompressed size,
and the inflater ignored the adler32 trailer, so corrupt data passed.
Listings now deflate through a fixed-Huffman encoder over an LZ77 match
finder, which shrinks a listing's repeated path prefixes to about a
tenth, and a stream whose trailer does not match is refused. No crate:
the encoder is a hundred lines beside the inflater it feeds, and the
inflater is named for what it does.
Answering a search lowercased every shared path again for every query:
with a large share and the steady stream of searches the server forwards,
that is an allocation per file per search. The lowercase key is now
computed once when the share is scanned.
Downloads read the peer socket 8 KiB at a time, eight syscalls where one
now does; the reference clients read 50 to 256 KiB. Progress was reported
every fifteen reads, a cadence that stops meaning anything once a read
can be anywhere from a few bytes to 64 KiB, so a report now lands every
128 KiB received instead: the same volume as before for a fast peer, and
a window wide enough for a slow peer's rate to mean something.
Progress assumed every read had filled the buffer, so a peer trickling
small chunks was reported at up to several times its real rate. The
rate now comes from the bytes received since the last report.
A NAT that drops an idle mapping leaves the server socket looking
connected while the server can no longer reach us, and nothing errors:
peers stop finding us and searches go unanswered until a restart. The
server socket now carries TCP keepalive (idle 10s, interval 2s, ten
probes), which keeps the mapping alive and turns a dead path into a read
error within about half a minute, as Nicotine+ does. The server stopped
answering ServerPing (code 32) long ago, so an application ping is no
substitute. Windows gets a no-op until the daemon ships there.
Opening a user's profile in SoulseekQt or Nicotine+ asks that peer
directly (peer code 15), and a peer that never answers shows an endless
spinner. The reply (code 16) carries no description or picture, the
configured upload slot count, how many uploads are waiting, and whether a
slot is free right now, which is what the reference clients send.
soulfind has reported the host's LAN address for a loopback login since
1eab2e8 (November 2025), so the client dials the mocks there and a
listener bound to 127.0.0.1 refuses it: every upload and most downloads
failed against a current soulfind while the e2e suite, whose mocks
already bind all interfaces, stayed green.
"Download folder" in SoulseekQt and Nicotine+ asks the sharer for that
one folder (peer code 36) instead of the whole share, and a sharer that
never answers leaves the folder download hanging. The requested folder
now comes back as a FolderContentsResponse (code 37), which carries a
directory listing in the same form a browse does, so the two share one
codec. The browse and folder replies also share one reply helper.
Every reply to a peer's search claimed a free upload slot, no speed and
an empty queue, whatever the sharer was doing, and searchers rank
sources on exactly those fields. A reply now says whether a slot is
free, the bytes per second of the last completed upload, and how many
uploads are waiting.
Dispatch read one byte of the code, so a code with a non-zero high byte
was handled as its low byte. Message::get_message_code now reads the
whole little-endian uint32 and handlers register by u32. PeerInit and
PierceFirewall, the only frames with a one-byte code, get their own
accessor for the listener's first frame.
A search token was the first five hex digits of the query's MD5, so two
queries could share one, and a peer's answer to either landed in whichever
search the map handed back first. Tokens now come from a counter, which
no two live searches can share.
The e2e test uses two queries that collide under the old scheme.
A broad query against a big share was answered with every match, so one
search could hand the whole index to a stranger, and every such search
did it again. A reply now carries at most MAX_SEARCH_REPLY_FILES (150,
Nicotine+'s default), which is more sources than any searcher scrolls
through.
Michel de Graaf