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Roadmap

Improve Network Performance

Summary

An ordinary Urbit ship needs to be able to host a large chatroom, in addition to other scaling considerations. The performance of Urbit's networking is the bottleneck limiting this kind of scaling at the moment.

A number of incremental improvements need to be made to the implementation of Ames, Urbit's networking protocol, including fixes for flaky connections and more efficient use of timers. A second protocol called Fine will also be added for scalable content distribution. A multi-part project called "subscription reform" will allow apps to use this protocol effectively.

Projects

Completed

HTTP Mutable URL Caching

duration

1 Month

Urbit should be able to serve websites at custom URLs efficiently to support serving websites to the old web from a single ship without needing to configure caching reverse proxies such as nginx or varnish.

Completed

Basic Remote Scry Protocol

duration

1-2 Months

start date

2021-01-01

end date

2023-05-09

The "Fine" remote scry protocol will form the foundation of scalable content distribution in Urbit, by allowing many subscriber ships to read data efficiently from a publisher ship without incurring excessive load on the publisher.

Completed

Solid-State Publications Prototype

start date

2022-10-25

end date

2023-03-01

For scalability, basic solid-state publications are being prototyped. This is the next step after basic remote scry toward scalable data publishing on Urbit. These prototypes live in userspace; once we've proven the model with some real-world examples, we can build kernel support into Gall.

Completed

Tune %clog Backpressure Time and Space Constants

duration

1 Week

start date

2022-06-05

end date

2023-02-13

Tuning the constants in Ames's `%clog` system should reduce network flakiness, reduce the number of Arvo events, and improve publication bandwidth, especially until chat uses remote scry and solid-state subscriptions.

Completed

Typed Paths

duration

1 Week

end date

2023-05-09

Typed paths should improve performance and developer experience, and it could unblock a typed interface to publications.

Future

Commit Before Compute

duration

1-3 Months

owner

TBD

Current Vere needs to run Nock on an event before it can write it to disk. This places a lower bound on event latency, defined as time between receiving an event and performing its effects, at `D + N`, i.e. disk write latency (`D`) plus nock execution time (`N`). Commit-before-compute has amortized latency `max(D, N)`, which is usually significantly better.

Future

Consolidate Packet Re-Send Timers

duration

1 Month

owner

TBD

Ames sets a lot of timers to remind it to send packets again if they don't get acknowledged fast enough. Reducing the number of timers lowers disk write usage, improves quiescence (which should eventually let hosting providers use less RAM and thereby lower costs), and should improve overall performance on publisher ships.

Future

Encrypted Remote Scry

duration

2-3 Months

owner

TBD

Arvo needs to encrypt scry paths and the values bound to them in order to use the remote scry protocol for private data such as group chats. This requires changes to the kernel to distribute encryption keys and let applications determine which other ships should have access to data in which publications.

Future

Generalized Deferral Mechanism

duration

TBD

owner

TBD

Arvo's Behn vane (kernel module) currently serves two purposes: setting timers, and deferring tasks to later events. Deferral could be split out into a separate feature, which could aid both in refactoring Behn to be easier to verify and optimize.

Future

HTTP Scrying

duration

2-3 Months

owner

TBD

The scry namespace should be made available over HTTP, to improve developer experience and performance for Urbit clients ("airlocks").

Future

Nan Madol

duration

TBD

owner

TBD

A far-out proposal is to have the runtime perform serialization, packetization, encryption, and congestion control, instead of Arvo.

Future

Add %pine Query-At-Latest Protocol

duration

1-2 Months

owner

TBD

Remote scry on its own doesn't let one ship determine the latest state of a publication on another ship. This is solved by adding another protocol alongside the remote scry network protocol to implement `%pine` query-at-latest requests over the network, as pure reads.

Future

Refactor Ames Vane

start date

2022-12-01

end date

2023-03-16

The Ames vane could be shorter, easier to read, more performant, and easier to prove correct.

Future

Shared Memory IPC

duration

2-3 Months

owner

TBD

Vere's two processes, Urth (the I/O process) and Mars (the Nock worker process), communicate using a custom noun-based interprocess communication (IPC) protocol. This currently uses the Unix stdin and stdout, but using shared memory instead would make IPC significantly faster, reducing event processing latency and improving overall data throughput.

Future

duration

1 Week

owner

TBD

The way ships ping their sponsors doesn't always work well behind home routers or other NATs, causing flaky connections.

Future

Symmetric Routing

duration

3-6 Months

Symmetric routing should improve multiple things about Ames networking, enabling star packet forwarding, as well as improving firewall flakiness and peer discovery.

Future

Timer Improvements

duration

TBD

owner

TBD

Urbit's timer system could be better in several ways.

Future

Typed Interface to Solid-State Publications

duration

4-8 Months

A typed interface to solid-state publications should improve developer experience and performance (by avoiding runtime typechecks and type coercions).

Future

Add Urth-to-Urth Network Push Sessions

duration

4-6 Months

owner

TBD

Solid-state publications that need low latency, such as chat, can't use the remote scry protocol without adding a new protocol to "push" updates to subscribers as soon as they are created. This protocol is Urth-to-Urth, and opt-in, to ensure naive runtimes still work without it (both as publisher and subscriber).