Tessera Party Info Polling

Until version 0.11, Tessera P2P polling is indefinite with all configured/discovered nodes at the defined interval irrespective of whether the remote node is active/down or retired.

From Version 0.11, the partyinfo discovery has changed to only keep active connections to assist with better debugging of network issues.

The changes are summarised below:

• Introduction of NetworkStore that keeps track of ActiveNodes in the network. If a remote node is present in this list it means there is currently active direct communication with that node, meaning the local node is aware of remote node’s keys and supportedApiVersions.
• PartyStore maintains a list of URLs that we use to broadcast our own partyinfo. If there is a connection exception during an attempt to broadcast partyinfo (a peer temporarily being down), we will remove this peer from both our PartyStore and NetworkStore.
• At any point in time there must be at least one active node in the Tessera's configured peer list. If all connections fail and the URLs are subsequently removed, resulting in the PartyStore having none of the URLs configured left, Tessera will re-populate the URLs from configured peer list to PartyStore and try again until at least one configured peer is back up online.
• Tessera will add URLs of remote nodes discovered from other nodes into PartyStore. It will add the URL with key into NetworkStore only after establishing direct communication with the remote node.
• When broadcasting partyinfo to peers, Tessera will now only broadcast its own public keys, and a list of URLs that it already has direct contact with. This will improve security and make communications between nodes much cleaner (dead nodes will no longer be broadcasted to peers like in past, only ActiveNodes).
• Get /partyinfo is amended to return only ActiveNodes.