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This is a plugin that regularly probes the network by sending a random payment to a random destination. These do not succeed, since we randomly selected the `payment_hash`, but can still give us a lot of insight into the network health. The plugin stores its results in a `sqlite3` database for later inspection. Signed-off-by: Christian Decker <decker.christian@gmail.com>
33 lines
1.5 KiB
Markdown
33 lines
1.5 KiB
Markdown
# Network Probe plugin
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This plugin regularly performs a random probe of the network by sending a
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payment to a random node in the network, with a random `payment_hash`, and
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observing how the network reacts. The random `payment_hash` results in the
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payments being rejected at the destination, so no funds are actually
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transferred. The error messages however allow us to gather some information
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about the success probability of a payment, and the stability of the channels.
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The random selection of destination nodes is a worst case scenario, since it's
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likely that most of the nodes in the network are leaf nodes that are not
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well-connected and often offline at any point in time. Expect to see a lot of
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errors about being unable to route these payments as a result of this.
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The probe data is stored in a sqlite3 database for later inspection and to be
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able to eventually draw pretty plots about how the network stability changes
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over time. For now you can inspect the results using the `sqlite3` command
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line utility:
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```bash
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sqlite3 ~/.lightning/probes.db "select destination, erring_channel, failcode from probes"
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```
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Failcode -1 and 16399 are special:
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- -1 indicates that we were unable to find a route to the destination. This
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usually indicates that this is a leaf node that is currently offline.
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- 16399 is the code for unknown payment details and indicates a successful
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probe. The destination received the incoming payment but could not find a
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matching `payment_key`, which is expected since we generated the
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`payment_hash` at random :-)
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