Feb 11, 2023

The reason this matters (a lot) to initial block download performance is that we want to always find the fastest available peers. Diversity doesn't matter in terms of block fill. That's only important for discovery of the header chain (which is not optimized for fast peers). To find faster peers you drop the slow ones and try another. The time spent waiting on another is costly, and if too long ends up requiring that you just maintain more channels, but this causes more work factoring. As I found in prototyping work, getting channels quickly makes a big difference. But I was never able to operate at this density before. With batches of 100 we can establish a connection almost instantly.