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 slot cap merged from master defaults to 2 uploads, and the CLI capped
downloads at 5. Those are the numbers you pick when your own bandwidth is the
scarce resource, but a Soulseek transfer is paced by the peer on the other end
— usually a few hundred KiB/s — so what fills a modern link is many transfers
at once, not faster ones. Upload slots go to 10, downloads to 20. The queue
itself stays: privileged users being able to jump it is a condition of being a
tolerated third-party client.
serve_file also slept half a second after the last byte so the downloader could
drain before the socket closed. With a cap that is time no other peer can use,
and 64 uploads over 10 slots paid it six times over. A half-close says "that is
the whole file" and TCP still delivers everything written before the FIN.
Measured with 64 waiting peers: 2 slots 24.2s, 8 slots 6.2s, 32 slots 3.1s; at
10 slots the linger alone was 5.4s to 3.05s.
The client had never been driven at scale. A stress harness that mixes
searches, downloads, uploads and browses against a local soulfind found four
ceilings, three of which lose work silently rather than merely being slow.
Peers were capped at one per core. ActorSystem ran each actor's whole lifetime
as one job on a fixed-size ThreadPool, and actor loops block until stopped, so
the pool acted as a semaphore: past the cap an actor never started, never
connected and never errored, and uploads stopped working entirely. The pool had
exactly one consumer and every job it received was non-terminating, so it is
gone; actors get their own thread.
TransferResponse raced the bookkeeping it depends on. It was sent straight back
to the peer while UpdateDownloadTokens was still queued for the client loop —
but the response is what invites the peer's file connection, and that connection
is matched by token. Under load the client loop lost, the file connection
matched nothing, and the download sat on Queued forever. The response now goes
out after the token is recorded.
Download tokens were md5(filename) truncated to 20 bits, and the store deletes
every entry matching a token, so two downloads sharing one destroyed each other
— which fetching the same filename from two peers does every time. They now
come from a counter.
Port 0 from GetPeerAddress means the server does not know where a user listens.
It was cached and dialled, and the upload waiting on it was dropped. It is no
longer cached or served against; the connect attempt stays, because its failure
is what makes an unreachable peer fall back to server brokering.
Mixed profile at 1024 peers: 512/512 downloads, 256/256 uploads, 400-850 MiB/s
in ~7s, against 71/96 downloads at 7.9 MiB/s and a 60s timeout before.
Michel de Graaf