Learning the Depth of the network

[cramt]

Crazy Thought Time:

An annoyance of topics is that since they need to propagate to everyone on the network. And if the network is circular in some way, they need a ttl so dont end up sending the topic message round and round forever. However picking a ttl is hard because we wanna strike a balance between messages spinning in circles for too long and clients never getting the message.

Hypothetically you can learn the depth of a network via an algorithm that works sorta like this

• TOPIC, TTL: 1: "whats your address, tell "
• wait some timeout to collect all the addresses
• TOPIC, TTL: 2: "whats your address, tell "
• wait some timeout to collect all the addresses
• keep going until the total set of address you've collected doesnt change between, the ttl is the depth of the network

If one has a large network it might be smart to have someone like the seed router to do and then have everyone send topics not from themselves but ask the seed router to send it out for them since they seed router will know the perfect ttl for the current network