Faster block/blob propagation in Ethereum

Hi @arajasek, nice to see you join the discussion here!

arajasek:

We integrated our library with Shadow, and ran the same Ethereum mainnet-like experiments as @ppopth did in the “Doubling the blob count” experiments (thank you for the great work there, was very easy to build on).

Note that Shadow does not account for CPU time. Depending on how you have integrated your code, this can be quite a difference compared to runs on testbeds. We are investigating how to get around this (it was part of Shadow to some extent, but removed to favor reproducibility).

Unlike the approach here, we modified the Gossipsub protocol itself to work with chunks. I think this is important, because that way you have full control over how chunks are propagated. I’m not sure how the approach in this thread works …

There have been various studies on doing large message propagation over GossipSub with chunking. In the FullDAS work (where the simulation part also uses nim-libp2p + Shadow), I’ve used a naive approach in the implementation, simply using small messages and handling anything related to the large message context at a higher level in the stack. But the linked post also contains proposals for structured message IDs, bitmap based IHAVE/IWANT, etc.

It would be really interesting to see what modifications you did in your version.