Challenge 3d: Efficient Broadcast

desccode

Built on our fault-tolerant broadcast, now we're handling bigger clusters and network latency! wild part? the simple periodic sync solution from 3c turned out to be efficient.

What it Does

Instead of trying to optimize topology or create complex protocols, kept our dead simple approach:

How it Works

Message Batching

The magic happens automatically:

Performance

With 25 nodes and 100ms latency:

Why This Works

  1. Natural Batching: Multiple messages share the sync cost

  2. Good Timing: 500ms interval hits the sweet spot

  3. Still Fault-Tolerant: Keeps working through partitions

  4. Simple Scaling: Works even better than our naive broadcast!

Trade-offs

Pros:

Cons:

But sometimes one gets lucky and the simple solution turns out to be secretly smart. I'll take it for now good knowing that no solution is perfect, and it boils down to trade-offs and balances. It was interesting to play with latency and the nodes with this. Reducing ticker interval was at the cost of increased messages-per-op but lower median, p99, and max latencies (~300 and ~500ms resp. even).

The magic is in the ticker - natural batching without complexity.

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