[Haskell-cafe] ANN: HaskellTorrent v0.1.1

[Jesper Louis Andersen]

Hello Cafe,

I am pleased to announce yet another release of the HaskellTorrent
project. In this release, focus has been on improving upon the work
laid in v0.0. Highlights include:

* Certain data structures have changed from Data.List to Data.IntSet,
yielding much improved performance.
* Addition of a GetOpt option parser.
* Use of test-framework to run unit-tests.
* Assertion optimization, cutting down CPU usage by quite a margin.
* Change SHA1 checksumming to use Peter Simons hopenssl package. This
plugged some serious memory leaks.

* Support for listen() on port 1579 so incoming connections get
handled correctly.
* Support for more graceful stopping. The supervisor tree is now
terminated in the opposite order of creation.
* When closing down, tell the tracker we are stopping.
* Add KeepAlive messages on idle socket connections.
* Improve the console interface a bit so it is quasi-usable.

* Change the logging framework from my own to hslogger by John
Goerzen. It is better than my attempts and it shaves 150 lines of code
from the project not having to maintain a logging framework.

This also makes the client BEP003 compliant, so we can now claim to be
a full BitTorrent client. Looking forward, I'd like to get less CPU
usage, and support for more BitTorrent extensions.

--

There are still bugs in the code, so watch out for spinning processes.
Also, performance is still far from optimal. From a profiler run, we
get the following:

        total time  =       64.26 secs   (3213 ticks @ 20 ms)
        total alloc = 6,712,153,496 bytes  (excludes profiling overheads)

COST CENTRE                    MODULE               %time %alloc

MAIN                           MAIN                  58.0    3.7
assertPieceDB                  Process.PieceMgr      13.4   29.6
logP                           Process                3.7    6.0
syncP                          Process                2.8   12.1
download                       Main                   2.1    0.0
updateBS                       Digest                 2.1    0.0
recvP                          Process                2.0    4.3
chooseP                        Process                1.9    7.0
receiverP                      Process.Peer           1.8    1.5
peerP                          Process.Peer           1.2    0.6
grabBlocks'                    Process.PieceMgr       1.0    3.1
senderP                        Process.Peer           1.0    1.4
sendP                          Process                0.9    3.1
checkPiece                     FS                     0.7    6.1
msgPeer                        Process.ChokeMgr       0.6    2.4
registerL                      Process.Timer          0.2    1.9
getByteString                  Data.Serialize.Get     0.2    1.0
newBuffer                      Data.Serialize.Builder   0.0   10.1

which tells us we are still allocating far too much memory. I wonder
what the 58.0% on MAIN means (this is with -prof -auto-all -caf-all).
The code is heavily concurrent, using the cml package. My guess is
that we have somewhere between 500 and 1000 threads when running. I
ponder if that has something to do with it. The price of assertPieceDB
can easily be removed by running the assertions at a rarer pace.

-- 
J.