Quick Update - April the 16th, 2021

This Week’s Update

The team juggling a lot and we are super focused right now on getting all of our plans together so that we can spring into action as we bring the new and exciting capabilities of Holochain and Holo to developers, hosts, and the end users of P2P apps.

Last week I shared that we had the new proxy server running on Holochain and that the Holo team was beginning to test it. This updated version of Holochain with updated and optimised networking layers is what will allow us to scale from the ~400 hosts that have been testing Elemental Chat to the thousands, and perhaps even tens of thousands of web end-users who will be testing it once we launch Elemental Chat as a hosted hApp.

As of last night the testing of the proxy server revealed that the speed of signals is fantastic. All signals (20k of them) are consistently delivered within 30s of being sent. This is a vast improvement over our load tests previously with Elemental Chat. However, while that is working great - we have encountered a bug that we’re still sorting out that is slowing down the gossip function on the network. We expect that to be resolved in a few days, and immediately following that we’ll deploy this update to the current environment where hosts are testing.

Hosts are currently using a version of Elemental Chat that does not require a user to sign in. The app assumes that if you are using it, you are the host. That works because it is installed locally for the hosts who have their own HoloPorts and are connecting to them directly. During the sign-in for the hosted version of Elemental chat, each user is creating their credentials and then connecting those credentials from the browser to their hosted sourcechain. This is the magic of hosting p2p apps for regular web users. The source chain needs to persist and therefore the user must be able to login in (and log out and log back in) to connect their private keys which they keep locally in the browser to the sourcechain stored on the Holo network.

There is a critical moment right when the users are creating credentials where we have identified resilience issues. Essentially what happens is that if a user starts to sign in, and then decides not to and closes the browser tab, this borks or breaks the system - and it doesn’t break it for just one user. It can effect many others as well. This particular issue is one we described last week as well - and we’re still working through it. In part that’s because we had several team members on vacation last week and also it’s this issue has implications at many different layers of both Holochain and Holo.

We appreciate the continued participation of hosts in the test environment - there are over 300 peers and messages are flowing everyday. Folks are still joining regularly and having fun with the new identicons and discussing the goings on in the parts of the world where they live.

TLDR (Too long, didn’t read)

Testing of signals - which measures the arrival of an instant chat message is fantastic at the scale of 20,000 transactions.

We’re working through 2 major issues in dev right now.

As soon as we’re done with the the first - related to the proxy server, we will be releasing another update to our current test with hosts.

As soon as we’re done with the second one - related to web users stopping half way through creating credentials, we’ll be moving the hosted Elemental Chat release to a pre-release community test - in advance of the general Alpha release.

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