Tachyon

Tachyon is a performant and highly parallel reliable udp library that uses a nack based model.

• Strongly reliable
• Reliable fragmentation
• Ordered and unordered channels
• Identity management
• Suitable for high throughput IPC as well as games.

Tachyon was specifically designed for a verticaly scaled environment with many connected clients and high throughput local IPC. Parallelism for receives was necessary to be able to process the volume within a single frame. And larger receive windows were needed to handle the IPC volume while still retaining strong reliability.

Reliablity

Tachyon uses a different model then most due to wanting to support higher message volumes and larger messages. There is a core trade off in reliability approaches where the more space efficient they are, the smaller the reliability window they can support. A popular approach in games is Glen Fiedler's approach that encodes acks as bit flags. The normal usage of it is to encode acks in every outgoing message. But that means if you send 33 messages per frame, you used up the entire window in a single frame. It's designed to be used with higher level message aggregation, sending say 1-4 packets per frame or so.

The nack model can optimistically cover a much larger window in 33 slots, because we are only covering missing packets. Tachyon extends this further with a approach that can cover very large windows, the default is 512 slots per channel.

The receive window has a configurable max. It starts at the last in order sequence received, and runs to the last sequence received. Once per frame we walk this window back to front and create nack messages each covering 33 slots. And then pack those into a single varint encoded network packet.

But that message itself could get dropped, introducing latency. So we also support taking those same nacks and insert them into outgoing messages in a round robin fashion. Up to TachyonConfig.nack_redundancy times per unique nack. The idea here is nacks in outgoing messages will cover per frame combined nacks that were dropped recently. And the per frame nacks provide the larger window coverage. The cost for redundancy is the outgoing message header size goes from 4 to 10 bytes.

One thing to keep in mind is that the nack models needs a constant message flow in order to know what is missing. So if you have channels with only occasional messages, you should send a header + 1 sized message regularly. Tachyon should just add an internal message here that automatically sends on every channel if nothing else went out, but that's not in yet.

We also have logic to expire messages that last too long in the send buffers. Like occasional large messages that have their own channel. The send buffer is 1024, double the size of the default receive window.

Channels

Sequencing is per channel. With every connected address (connection) having it's own set of channels.

The system configures two channels automatically channel 1 being ordered and channel 2 unordered. And you can add more but they need to be added before bind/connect. Because they are per address, on the server side we lazily create channels as we see receives from new addresses.

Fragmentation

Fragments are individually reliable. Each one is sent as a separate sequenced message. So larger messages work fairly well, just not too large where you start chewing up too much of the receive window.

Ordered vs Unordered

The difference here is pretty simple and as you would expect. Ordered messages are only delivered in order. Unordered are delivered as soon as they arrive. Both are reliable.

Connection management

Connections are an awkward term to use with udp. Because even though they aren't connected like TCP is, the udp api does have a notion of connection. So defining connection as something more with application level features really just makes it all more confusing.

So to make things clear Tachyon connections mirror udp connections. And then we add an Identity abstraction that can be linked to a connection. An identity is an integer id and session id created by the application. You set an id/session pair on the server, and you tell the client what they are out of band say via https. If configured to use identities the client will automatically attempt to link it's identity after connect. If the client ip changes it needs to request to be linked again. The server when it links first removes any addresses previously linked. With identities enabled regular messages are blocked on both ends until identity is established.

Concurrency

The best concurrency is no concurrency. Tachyon is parallel but uses no concurrency primitives internally. Instead it leverages the nature of Udp by simply running multiple Tachyon instances one per port. And provides a Pool abstraction to manage these instances and run their receive flows in parallel.

Concurrent sending is supported for unreliable but not reliable. For reliable sends you have to send from one thread at a time. Udp sockets are atomic at the OS level, so unreliable is just a direct path to that. UnreliableSender is a struct that can be created for use in other threads. That is a rust thing it's not needed for actual thread safety it's just needed for Rust to know it's safe.

Parallel receiving does have additional overhead. It allocates bytes for received messages and then finally pushes those all to a single consumer queue. The design is a concurrent queue of non concurrent queues. A Tachyon instance will do a concurrent dequeue of the normal queue, receive into that, and then enqueue that back onto the concurrent queue. Batch level atomic ops nothing fine grained.

Performance

Cpu time is mostly in udp syscalls. But very heavy packet loss can also increase cpu time because larger receive windows make Tachyon itself do more work as it has to iterate over those.

Unreliable

Unreliable messages have a hot path where there is almost no processing done. Reliable messages we have to buffer anyways, so sent/received messages you are just dealign with the body. With unreliable you have to send a byte array that is the message plus 1 byte. And received messages will also include the 1 byte header. You don't touch the header and you can't mess it up because Tachyon will write it on send. But you do have to reason about it. The alternative is memcpy on send and receive.

Todo list

Integrate the pooling so it's more seamless. Mostly a matter of tweaking the public api a bit and a few more helper methods. You shouldn't really have to think about the parallelism you just pick a level and go.

There is a complete C# integration layer not yet pushed to github. Should be coming soon.

Usage

Not much in the way of documentation yet but there are a good number of unit tests. And ffi.rs encapsulates most of the api. tachyon_tests.rs has some stress testing unit tests. The api is designed primarily for ffi consumption, as I use it from a .NET server.

update() has to be called once per frame. That is where nacks and resends in response to nacks received are sent. In addition to some housekeeping and fragment expiration. Sends are processed immediately.

Basic usage.

let config = TachyonConfig::default();
let server = Tachyon::create(config);
let client = Tachyon::create(config);

let address = NetworkAddress { a: 127, b: 0, c: 0, d: 0, port: 8001};
server.bind(address);
client.connect(address);

let send_buffer: Vec<u8> = vec![0;1024];
let receive_buffer: Vec<u8> = vec![0;4096];

client.send_reliable(1, NetworkAddress::default(), &mut send_buffer, 32);
let receive_result = server.receive_loop(&mut receive_buffer);
if receive_result.length > 0 && receive_result.error == 0 {
    server.send_reliable(1, receive_result.address, &mut send_buffer, 32);
}

client.update();
server.update();

Pool usage

let mut pool = Pool::create();
let config = TachyonConfig::default();

// create_server also binds the port
pool.create_server(config, NetworkAddress::localhost(8001));
pool.create_server(config, NetworkAddress::localhost(8002));
pool.create_server(config, NetworkAddress::localhost(8003));

// using built in test client which removes some boilerplate
let mut client1 = TachyonTestClient::create(NetworkAddress::localhost(8001));
let mut client2 = TachyonTestClient::create(NetworkAddress::localhost(8002));
let mut client3 = TachyonTestClient::create(NetworkAddress::localhost(8003));
client1.connect();
client2.connect();
client3.connect();

let count = 20000;
let msg_len = 64;

for _ in 0..count {
    client1.client_send_reliable(1, msg_len);
    client2.client_send_reliable(1, msg_len);
    client3.client_send_reliable(1, msg_len);
}
// non blocking receive
let receiving = pool.receive();

// call this to finish/wait on the receive.
let res = pool.finish_receive();

// or alternative call pool.receive_blocking() which doesn't need a finish_receive().