Network Manager

The network communication layer in Bitcoin was showing its age and Bitcoin Classic has included a new component called the Network Manager. The Network Manager is an advanced network layer that will speed up network communications for any network protocol that would use it. In the long term we may end up with the Bitcoin peer-to-peer (p2p) layer using it, for now the usage is limited to the AdminServer.

The is designed to send messages to connected peers. Messages are addressed to services and messages have a message ID. This basic design allows various components of the same application to reuse the same connection without interference making the network manager do the routing and delivering the message to the right service.

The first version of the NM has the following features:

• Direct socket communication.
• Follows the principle of making the common easy (and fast) and the complex possible. For instance message-headers are auto generated if not supplied, but a user can generate the whole thing if they so wish.
• zero-copy sending/receiving of messages.
• lock-free operation for sending/receiving of messages.
• asynchronous operation. By default uses multithreading.
• uses zero singletons and zero global variables.
• priority-queues. (all messages are not equal).
• The network layer is messages-based, allowing the user to send messages to certain services on a peer, much like zmq allows.
• Optimised binary protocol CMF, saving a lot of bandwidth.
• build in temporary banning (punishment) of misbehaving connections.