PNRP Speed - peer to peer - wcf

Just curious to know what your experiences with PNRP are? I have been using WCF to code up a peer to peer application using WCF.
I support 2 different setups, one using PNRP (i.e. no server) and another setup using a central server.
The central server approach is really fast over a LAN, peers can connect in around 0.5 - 2 seconds max. With PNRP though it sometimes takes up to a minute for peers to connect.
Is this normal? Is something wrong with my setup?
Ages ago I disabled teredo, and that caused PNRP to run very fast. But at the end of the day we will probably need to keep teredo in the mix to help with our application running over a WAN.
Thoughts?

I have used WCF's Peer Channels in an application requiring a Transient Elected Server State. This only needs to work on the LinkLocal cloud, the peers will all be on the same subnet. It does seem to take an inordinate amount of time to register with a cloud, and I am not sure how to confirm if a particular peer is currently registered in a particular cloud (using the abstraction of Peer Channels), but otherwise I like the convenience of it.

Related

WebRTC with SFU using so many PeerConnection as Consumer in Group call?

I'am develop group call like google meet using WebRTC and SFU method for routing.
my project work well, until i open chrome://webrtc-internals to see webrtc connection status. and i compare with google meet.
Google meet
only 1 peer connection is active.
my project.
1 peer connection active for broadcast.
n-1 peer connection active as consumer.
so if total users in a room is 5. then on each client side has 5
peer connections are active too (1 as broadcaster, 4 as
consumers).
so my question is, how i can using only 1 peer connection as consumer? or using 1 peer connection as broadcast and also as consumer? maybe my method wrong? or misunderstood the implementation of SFU.
any suggestions or solutions?
I am still discovering/learning the stack of webrtc and related architectures, so take what I am saying with a grain of salt.
With a SFU architecture you can have multiple strategies to distribute the streams between your clients. In all case, you save bandwidth for the local user by only sending his streams once to the SFU.
As you state, for n users you can open 1 RTCPeerConnection with the SFU for the local user and n-1 RTCPeerConnection for remote users.
You can open only one RTCPeerConnection with the SFU for any number of users in the "room". To achieve this, when a new user enters the SFU session, his streams need to be added to the tracks of the PeerConnection present at the SFU. It will trigger some renegotiation through signaling, and your users will know a new track (stream) has been added. The client (javascript code for example) needs to identify the new tracks to a specific user, for that you can add the information of this user in the signaling payload. From the point of view of a given user, these new tracks (audio+video) will correspond to a new user.
The first approach is simpler but takes more ressources, more ice candidate to gather, stun request, connections to the SFU, etc..
The second one is more efficient but harder to implements. Both on the client and the server.
A link to bloggeek.me, which provides excellent ressources for webrtc, and talks about these two approaches, far better than me.
The post states that Jitsi server, use only one peer connection with the SFU, per user.
Other strategies exist, in livekit server, a SFU implementation in Golang, they use 2 PeerConnection per user. One for publishing the streams of the local user and the second to receive streams from all other users. Here a link to the client protocol of Livekit server
For approach 2 and 3, how SFU servers wire up all these streams correctly between each PeerConnection with a local user, I really don't know. It seems really specific to the project.
You have to check the SFU server API you are using, and see what is possible to do with it. But what you are looking for is definitely possible, given the "right" project for your use case.
For the client side it depends on project your are using too.
If you are in the early stage of your project, you can maybe check livekit server. It is an open source project, Apache 2.0 license, develop in golang, and provides a lot of interesting features out of the box. Auto scaling SFU instances through redis, kubernetes setup, client libraries in JavaScript, Flutter, a server sdk to interact with SFU instances in various langage, etc.. The ecosystem seems really nice and the documentation is good too.
Hope it helps a bit

Extra TCP connections on the RabbitMQ server after resource alarm

I have RabbitMQ Server 3.6.0 installed on Windows (I know it's time to upgrade, I've already done that on the other server node).
Heartbeats are enabled on both server and client side (heartbeat interval 60s).
I have had a resource alarm (RAM limit), and after that I have observed the raise of amount of TCP connections to RMQ Server.
At the moment there're 18000 connections while normal amount is 6000.
Via management plugin I can see there is a lot of connections with 0 channels, while our "normal" connection have at least 1 channel.
And even RMQ Server restart won't help: all connections would re-establish.
   1. Does that mean all of them are really alive?
Similar issue was described here https://github.com/rabbitmq/rabbitmq-server/issues/384, but as I can see it was fixed exactly in v3.6.0.
   2. Do I understand right that before RMQ Server v3.6.0 the behavior after resource alarm was like that: several TCP connections could hang on server side per 1 real client autorecovery connection?
Maybe important: we have haProxy between the server and the clients. 
   3. Could haProxy be an explanation for this extra connections? Maybe it prevents client from receiving a signal the connection was closed due to resource alarm?
Are all of them alive?
Only you can answer this, but I would ask - how is it that you are ending up with many thousands of connections? Really, you should only create one connection per logical process. So if you really have 6,000 logical processes connecting to the server, that might be a reason for that many connections, but in my opinion, you're well beyond reasonable design limits even in that case.
To check, see how many connections decrease when you kill one of your logical processes.
Do I understand right that before RMQ Server v3.6.0 the behavior after resource alarm was like that: several TCP connections could hang on server side per 1 real client autorecovery connection?
As far as I can tell, yes. It looks like the developer in this case ran across a common problem in sockets, and that is the detection of dropped connections. If I had a dollar for every time someone misunderstood how TCP works, I'd have more money than Bezos. So, what they found is that someone made some bad assumptions, when actually read or write is required to detect a dead socket, and the developer wrote code to (attempt) to handle it properly. It is important to note that this does not look like a very comprehensive fix, so if the conceptual design problem had been introduced to another part of the code, then this bug might still be around in some form. Searching for bug reports might give you a more detailed answer, or asking someone on that support list.
Could haProxy be an explanation for this extra connections?
That depends. In theory, haProxy as is just a pass-through. For the connection to be recognized by the broker, it's got to go through a handshake, which is a deliberate process and cannot happen inadvertently. Closing a connection also requires a handshake, which is where haProxy might be the culprit. If haProxy thinks the connection is dead and drops it without that process, then it could be a contributing cause. But it is not in and of itself making these new connections.
The RabbitMQ team monitors this mailing list and only sometimes answers questions on StackOverflow.
I recommended that this user upgrade from Erlang 18, which has known TCP connection issues -
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/rabbitmq-users/R3700QdIVJs/taDYKI6bAgAJ
I've managed to reproduce the problem: in the end it was a bug in the way our client used RMQ connections.
It created 1 auto-recovery connection (that's all fine with that) and sometimes it created a separate simple connection for "temporary" purposes.
Step to reproduce my problem were:
Reach memory alarm in RabbitMQ (e.g. set up an easily reached RAM
limit and push a lot of big messages). Connections would be in state
"blocking".
Start sending message from our client with this new "temp" connection.
Ensure the connection is in state "blocked".
Without eliminating resource alarm, restart RabbitMQ node.
The "temp" connection itself was here! Despite the fact auto-recovery
was not enabled for it. And it continued sending heartbeats so the
server didn't close it.
We will fix the client to use one and the only connection always.
Plus we of course will upgrade Erlang.

Redis clients broadcast problems (in the context of Socket.IO)

So I've read some articles about scaling Socket.IO. For various reasons I don't want to use built-in Socket.IO scaling mechanism (mostly it seems to be inefficient, since it publishes a lot more stuff to Redis then required from my point of view).
So I've came up with this simple idea:
Each Socket.IO server creates Redis pub/sub/store clients, connects to Redis and subscribes to a channel. Now, when I want to broadcast data I just publish it to Redis and all other Socket.IO servers get it and push it to users.
There is a problem, though (which I think is also a problem for Socket.IO built-in mechanism). Let's say I want to know the number of all connected users. There are at least two ways of doing that:
Server A publishes give_me_clients to Redis. Then each Socket.IO server counts connections and publishes number_of_clients. Server A grabs this data, combines it and sends it to the client.
Each server updates number_of_clients_for::ID_HERE in Redis whenever user connects/disconnects to the server. Then Server A just fetches data and combines it. Might be more efficient.
There are problems with these solutions though:
Server A is not aware of other servers. Therefore he does not know when he should stop listening to number_of_clients. One could fix it with making Server A aware of other servers: whenever a server connects to Redis he publishes new_server (Server A grabs the data and stores it in memory). But what to do, when Redis - Socket.IO connection breaks? Is there a way for Redis to notify clients that one of the client disconnected?
Actually the same as above. When a Socket.IO server crashes how to clear number_of_clients data?
So the real question is: can Redis notify (publish to chanel) clients that the connection with one of them has just ended??
After a lot of testing it seems, that Redis does not have such functionality. Also I've found out, that scaling Socket.IO is really a pain.
So I've switched from Socket.IO to WS (see this link). It is low level (but perfect for my use) and it only supports WebSockets (in all major versions). But then again I only want to support WebSockets and FlashSocket (which I have to imlement manually, but that's fine).
The advantage is that I can easily create cluster with such servers. HAProxy works with such servers almost out of the box (some minor tuning). Servers can easily communicate on a local net (with UDP or central TCP server if the cluster is big).
The disadvantage is that one have to manually implement some cool features like heartbeats, broadcasting, rooms, etc. Also you want have long-polling fallback, but that's fine in my case. Scaling is still more important, imho.

Maximum number of concurrent NSURLConnections to the same host?

I'm running in to an issue in an OS X app that creates multiple, persistent connections to the same host using NSURLConnection. I create a separate connection for different rooms, and it stays connected the entire time the room is open to consume a streaming API. When opening many rooms, it stops working correctly.
I created a separate sample app that creates 10 connections, and it seems to only allow 6 connections to work, and the others are queued. Does anyone know if there is a way to override this limit? I can't find it documented anywhere. The only workaround I've found is it seems to be per host name, so testing with "localhost" and "127.0.0.1" allows 6 connections per host. I uploaded a sample project with client and server here - http://cl.ly/1x3K0D1F072V3U2T0C0I.
I filed a Radar for something that seems like the same issue but on iOS. I found that you can't have more than 5 connections open at once. The connections don't have to be pointing to the same domain. Anything after that would be queued. So if you have 5 connections open to an extremely slow endpoint, any other connections will not go through.
Radar: http://openradar.appspot.com/radar?id=2542401
Apple's reply:
This is the effect of our NSURLConnection connection cache. It is expected. We expect to address this type of configuration with new API.
I asked if they could give me anymore information (does it vary? does the type of connection affect it?) and they said:
Unfortunately, we can't give details about the connection limit behavior.
User agents in general (Chrome, Firefox, Safari) use six simultaneous TCP connections per hostname, with potential one-offs.
You could break this limitation by using CFNetwork API (CFHTTPMessage).
Here is the CFNetwork Programming Guide.
https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Networking/Conceptual/CFNetwork/Introduction/Introduction.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP30001132
BTW, if you decide to use CFNetwork, you'll need to work around the proxy and authenticate.
Wish this could helped!

Does WCF supports Peer-to-peer implementation?

I'm trying to implement peer-to-peer messaging and file sharing utility within LAN, So does WCF supports p2p? Does any one tried file sharing trough WCF?
Yes, it does. Please see How To Design State Sharing In A Peer Network:
When researching the various ways in
which an election scenario might be
implemented, I discovered that there
is an attribute in WCF that allows you
to indicate the maximum number of hops
that a particular message will travel.
After seeing this, it became obvious
that there was a means for sharing
state in a peer network that not only
required no central server, but was
resilient to node drop-off and did not
require election. I call it Nearest
Peer Synchronization.
Yes. Check out the NetPeerTCPBinding.