Freenet 0.7 build 1195 is now available. Please upgrade ASAP. There are several important changes in this build and recently, the first two of which have caveats: - Freenet nodes now accept fewer parallel requests. This is an attempt to reduce the average time taken by a successful CHK fetch, which was around 18 seconds on my node (see your stats page in advanced mode).
CAVEAT: In the short term, this may result in a significant loss of performance: once the network has settled, hopefully requests will be much faster in the sense of having significantly lower latency (we are aiming for an average of 5 seconds), with comparable overall throughput to now. If so, this will improve fproxy performance significantly. If this results in sustained loss of performance after a short period, we will revert it. CAVEAT: I accidentally released 1195 as self-mandatory, however in retrospect it is probably for the best, so 1195 is self-mandatory. Upgrade or be left behind! - We no longer ship the customised Firefox profile in the installer, due to its causing severe problems for a minority of users. CAVEAT: First, this means that new users will generally use the same browser to browse Freenet as to browse the web, possibly resulting in security breaches via e.g. browser history stealing. The best solution is to use a separate browser for browsing Freenet vs browsing the web. Another solution is to turn on history cloaking, see the next item. The second problem is that we are now limited by browser connection limits: Web browsers generally have a very low limit on the number of connections per server. A partial solution is to implement a progress screen when loading a page; this will be done in the near future. If you have expertise in Javascript, please contact us, we could really do with some help for the next stage. (End of caveats) - Some work on the bandwidth collapsing bug. Hopefully it won't be as severe, and ERRORs should be logged with enough information to track down the original cause. - Pad the last block of a splitfile before inserting it. This changes the CHKs yet again, but should make us immune to any future problems with padding algorithms; we have had 4 different padding algorithms, each generating different CHKs, and until we implemented a really ugly workaround a few builds ago, we had silent data corruption caused by this. - Minor changes to the web interface and themes, content flter, URI handling, connection setup, random number generator initialisation, plugins system, unit tests, installer (fix not hiding the freenet user from the login screen), website, various minor optimisations, and various code cleanups. - FCP support for getting the status of all peers, not just darknet peers. In addition, sdiz has done a massive amount of work on XMLSpider, the plugin that generates indexes for the search box on the home page (also known as XMLLibrarian), and a significant amount of work on XMLLibrarian. The spider in particular is massively improved, using a database and persisting its state across restarts, writing indexes only when needed, with a great deal of work on optimisation, and many bugfixes. Also, since the last build, I have done some work on the database branch, apart from having a week off over Christmas. Happy new year, and I apologise for the (necessary) length of this announcement! -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 827 bytes Desc: not available URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/support/attachments/20090110/38adbfd9/attachment.pgp>