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connmgr: Limit total overall normal connections.#3697

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davecgh:connmgr_limit_total_conns
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connmgr: Limit total overall normal connections.#3697
davecgh wants to merge 19 commits into
decred:masterfrom
davecgh:connmgr_limit_total_conns

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@davecgh davecgh commented May 19, 2026

This requires #3695 and #3696.

The current overall total connection limits are enforced by the server rather than the connection manager. This is not ideal for many reasons, but one of the most important consequences is that it makes DoS attacks easier. Another example of some less than ideal behavior that it allows is that some rare combinations of events can lead to temporary extra connection churn.

It is much more robust and natural to perform the limiting in the connection manager itself via semaphores. That approach not only significantly hardens the server against DoS attacks and solves various edge cases present in the current code, it also paves the way for even more advanced features such as traffic shaping in the future.

To that end, this adds semaphore-based limiting for the total overall number of normal connections to the connection manager and removes the relevant current limiting for it from the server.

Normal connections are the automatic outbound, manual outbound, and inbound connections. Persistent connections, on the other hand, are not subject to the limit since they have their own limiting. This is consistent with them not being subject to the automatic target outbound limit either.

It also adds tests to ensure that the new max normal connection limiting properly enforces the limit including automatic outbound, manual outbound, and inbound connections and that it is not applied to persistent connections.

davecgh added 4 commits May 13, 2026 05:27
This moves the logic related to requesting and advertising addresses to
after the handshake completes as opposed to doing it during the
handshake in the version message handler.

In practice, the overall effect is the same, but moving it to happen
after the handshake has at least the following benefits:

- It helps ensure no other messages are queued up or sent between the
  version and verack messages
- It keeps the version handler focused on its primary purpose of
  negotiation and rejection of peers deemed to be unsuitable
- It is easier to reason about the sequence of events
This adds the Network method to the addrmgr.NetAddress type so that it
can be used as a stdlib net.Addr.
This adds a new context-aware semaphore type with Acquire and Release
methods for use in upcoming changes that aim to simplify connection
limiting by making use of semaphores for blocking until permits become
available.
This adds tests for the new context-aware semaphore to ensure the
acquire, release, and context cancel semantics work as expected.
@davecgh davecgh added this to the 2.2.0 milestone May 19, 2026
@davecgh davecgh force-pushed the connmgr_limit_total_conns branch 3 times, most recently from a38ce05 to fc420cc Compare May 20, 2026 07:48
Comment thread internal/connmgr/connmanager_test.go Outdated
@davecgh davecgh force-pushed the connmgr_limit_total_conns branch 2 times, most recently from 6e11a06 to 0422204 Compare May 20, 2026 14:14
davecgh added 13 commits May 20, 2026 20:06
The existing connection manager code was written well before contexts
were introduced.  Further, due to the old async model that has now been
converted to a synchronous model, it is based around connection requests
that have their state atomically updated asynchronously as various
things happen.

While it has undoubtedly worked well enough for over a decade, it has
always been a challenge to add new functionality to it and requires the
use of a lot of less than ideal and highly outdated techniques such as
polling for state changes.  It is also rather brittle in terms of
requiring output connections to be manually disconnected in the
connection manager after they've been closed to avoid things like
leaking goroutines and failing to update target outbound counts.

Moreover, it only tracks outgoing connections which ultimately forces a
lot of connection-related tasks to be split across different layers
instead of residing in the connection manager itself where they more
naturally belong.  Notably, that split, for all intents and purposes,
prevents implementing some desirable more advanced features such as
immediate connection shedding, different connection types, and listeners
tied to specific network types.

With the primary goal of addressing all of the aforementioned points and
providing a solid base to work on for adding new features moving
forward, this significantly reworks the connection manager to completely
get rid of the notion of exposed connection requests in favor of a new
custom connection type that wraps the underlying net.Conn.

The new wrapped connections automatically handle cleanup when closed and
have an associated connection type enum that allows easily
distinguishing inbound, outbound, and manual connections as well as
supporting new connection types in the future.

Another nice feature of the new wrapped connections is they provide
efficient access to concrete parsed address types which paves the way
for avoiding a lot of constant reparsing, repeated host/port splitting
and joining, and generally much more ergonomic immutable address types.

Since changing to wrapped connections basically required a rather
significant rewrite of large portions of the connection manager anyway,
this also takes the opportunity to improve several other aspects of the
connection manager in the process such as implementing full context
support, full tracking of all connection types by the manager itself,
much more robust semaphore-based automatic connection limiting, cleaner
persistent connection handling with independent limits, prevention of
multiple connections of any type to the same address:port, more useful
debug logging, and cleanly closing all connections at during shutdown.

It is also important to note that the following overall semantics have
been intentionally been changed versus the existing connection manager:

- A maximum of 8 persistent connections is now imposed and they no
  longer count toward the configured target number of automatic outbound
  peers to maintain
- Duplicate addresses (including port) are now rejected by the
  connection manager for all types (inbound, outbound, manual,
  persistent)
  - Note that inbound conns from the same IP will necessarily have
    different ports, so the same max IP limits apply in that case
- RPC 'node connect' for all connection attempts now:
  - Supports the RPC connection and server contexts
  - Properly handles duplicate address rejection including pending
    attempts
- RPC 'node connect' for non-persistent conn attempts now:
  - Waits for the connection attempt result before returning
  - Returns an error if the connection attempt fails
  - Cancels the connection attempt if the RPC connection is closed
    before it succeeds
- RPC 'node remove' now supports removing a pending connection by its
  persistent connection ID (since no peer ID exists before a valid
  connection is established)
- It is no longer possible for state transitions to allow things like
  duplicate addresses or failed cancellation
The max retry duration is currently an unexported global variable that
the tests override at init time.  At least one of the tests also
additionally overrides it for that specified test too.  While this
works, it is somewhat brittle and prevents the tests from being run in
parallel.

This improves the situation by making the max retry duration a field on
the connection manager instead of a global variable and adding a test
helper for creating a new connection manager that overrides it by
default.  Then any tests that need a different value can simply override
it on their local instance.

It also makes the tests parallel since they can no longer clobber one
another.
This adds tests to ensure closing a connection multiple times works as
intended.
This adds tests to ensure duplication connections are rejected for all
possible states.
This adds tests to ensure attempts to add more than the maximum allowed
number of persistent are rejected.
This adds tests to ensure the Disconnect method properly disconnects
pending and established connections for both non-persistent and
persistent connections.
This adds tests to ensure the Remove method properly disconnects and
removes pending and established connections for both non-persistent and
persistent connections.
This updates the connmgr package README.md to match the new design and
capabilities.
Currently the whitelisting logic happens in the server which makes it
inaccessible to the connection manager.

In order to pave the way for supporting various connection-related logic
that currently happens in the server, but ideally should be happening in
the connection manager, this adds basic support for whitelisting CIDR
prefixes to the connection manager.

The connection manager config struct now accepts a slice of prefixes and
a new method named IsWhitelisted is added.

Note that this only adds support .  It does not update anything to use
the new functionality yet.
This adds tests to ensure the new whitelist detection method works as
expected.
This modifies the server to pass in the parsed whitelist entries to
the connection manager config and the relevant code to make use of the
new method it exposes.

Finally, it removes the no longer used local isWhitelisted method.
This adds a new TryAcquire method to the context-aware semaphore.  As
the name implies, the method supports conditionally acquiring the
semaphore only when resources are immediately available.  In other
words, it will not block when there are no resources immediately
available.
This adds tests for the new TryAcquire method on the context-aware
semaphore to ensure the semantics work as expected.
@davecgh davecgh force-pushed the connmgr_limit_total_conns branch from 0422204 to 4f48838 Compare May 21, 2026 01:50
davecgh added 2 commits May 20, 2026 20:56
The current overall total connection limits are enforced by the server
rather than the connection manager.  This is not ideal for many reasons,
but one of the most important consequences is that it makes DoS attacks
easier.  Another example of some less than ideal behavior that it allows
is that some rare combinations of events can lead to temporary extra
connection churn.

It is much more robust and natural to perform the limiting in the
connection manager itself via semaphores.  That approach not only
significantly hardens the server against DoS attacks and solves various
edge cases present in the current code, it also paves the way for even
more advanced features such as traffic shaping in the future.

To that end, this adds semaphore-based limiting for the total overall
number of normal connections to the connection manager and removes the
relevant current limiting for it from the server.

Normal connections are the automatic outbound, manual outbound, and
inbound connections.  Persistent connections, on the other hand, are not
subject to the limit since they have their own limiting.  This is
consistent with them not being subject to the automatic target outbound
limit either.
This adds tests to ensure that the new max normal connection limiting
properly enforces the limit including automatic outbound, manual
outbound, and inbound connections.

It also ensures that it not applied to persistent connections.
@davecgh davecgh force-pushed the connmgr_limit_total_conns branch from 4f48838 to 43d5772 Compare May 21, 2026 01:57
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