On Peer ProcessesThe diagram above is the control-flow in the Peer Process as it stands right now. This process is responsible for communicating with another Peer in haskell-bittorrent. This post is not about the details of the inner workings. Rather it serves to document the legend of the diagram.
All the ellipses that are blue signifies other processes. The inbound process waits on the socket for incoming messages and sends them into the Peer process. The outbound process is a queue which dequeues messages as fast as possible to the peer in the other end. Peer Manager is the process which manages a set of peers -- we have one Peer process for each peer. Finally, Piece Manager is responsible for managing the state of the torrent: what subsets of pieces do we have and what is missing before we have the full file?
A little bit of terminology: a piece is the smallest array of bytes we can SHA1 check for correctness. A block is a subset of a piece which is transferred by the wire protocol. In practice these are always 16K although the protocol provisions for alternative sizes. The reason for this split is that the 16K blocks means we can interleave other messages in between. Further, we can get a hunch on how fast we transfer to a peer by looking at the amount of bytes we can dequeue and smaller blocks means a better granularity.
The diagram depicts the control flow of the client. Black arrows designate how control transfers from one function to the next (usually by tail-calling this is functional programming after all). The blue dotted arrows specifies synchronization points with external processes. If a blue dotted arrow enters a box it usually means that control can only transfer to this point if the corresponding event tied to the arrow fires. The Piece Mgr and "Grab up to ..." is the exception from the rule however: when arrows are back and forth, it is a rpc call.
If a blue dotted arrow leaves towards an external process it means we will wait for a synchronization towards that process before continuing out of the box.
The current state
Modulo some work in the debugging and QA department, the client should be able to leech in a laboratory setting. We cheat by having no Peer Manager yet and we can essentially not really support many Peers properly yet. When the client portion stabilizes it should be fairly easy to add proper Peer managent. I hope to support leeching in the coming days.
Wanna help?
If you want to help out, there is plenty to do. I am still, deliberately, leaving many things open so it should be fairly easy to pick up the code from github and then do some of the simpler stuff. I've not run the excellent hlint by Neil Mitchell - so there should be an opportunity there. There is also an amortized queue implementation which could do with some documentation. Finally, the TODO list is littered with what needs to be done.
On github: haskell-torrent.
