There are a few major techniques that can be done to improve the perceived performance of I2P - some of the following are CPU related, others bandwidth related, and others still are protocol related. However, all of those dimensions affect the latency, throughput, and perceived performance of the network, as they reduce contention for scarce resources. This list is of course not comprehensive, but it does cover the major ones that are seen.

For past performance improvements see the Performance History.

Better peer profiling and selection

Probably one of the most important parts of getting faster performance will be improving how routers choose the peers that they build their tunnels through - making sure they don't use peers with slow links or ones with fast links that are overloaded, etc. In addition, we've got to make sure we don't expose ourselves to a Sybil attack from a powerful adversary with lots of fast machines.

Network database tuning

We're going to want to be more efficient with the network database's healing and maintenance algorithms - rather than constantly explore the keyspace for new peers - causing a significant number of network messages and router load - we can slow down or even stop exploring until we detect that there's something new worth finding (e.g. decay the exploration rate based upon the last time someone gave us a reference to someone we had never heard of). We can also do some tuning on what we actually send - how many peers we bounce back (or even if we bounce back a reply), as well as how many concurrent searches we perform.

Session Tag Tuning and Improvements

The way the ElGamal/AES+SessionTag algorithm works is by managing a set of random one-time-use 32 byte arrays, and expiring them if they aren't used quickly enough. If we expire them too soon, we're forced to fall back on a full (expensive) ElGamal encryption, but if we don't expire them quickly enough, we've got to reduce their quantity so that we don't run out of memory (and if the recipient somehow gets corrupted and loses some tags, even more encryption failures may occur prior to detection). With some more active detection and feedback driven algorithms, we can safely and more efficiently tune the lifetime of the tags, replacing the ElGamal encryption with a trivial AES operation.

Additional ideas for improving Session Tag delivery are described on the ElGamal/AES+SessionTag page.

Migrate sessionTag to synchronized PRNG

Right now, our ElGamal/AES+SessionTag algorithm works by tagging each encrypted message with a unique random 32 byte nonce (a "session tag"), identifying that message as being encrypted with the associated AES session's key. This prevents peers from distinguishing messages that are part of the same session, since each message has a completely new random tag. To accomplish this, every few messages bundle a whole new set of session tags within the encrypted message itself, transparently delivering a way to identify future messages. We then have to keep track of what messages are successfully delivered so that we know what tags we may use.

This works fine and is fairly robust, however it is inefficient in terms of bandwidth usage, as it requires the delivery of these tags ahead of time (and not all tags may be necessary, or some may be wasted, due to their expiration). On average though, predelivering the session tag costs 32 bytes per message (the size of a tag). As Taral suggested though, that size can be avoided by replacing the delivery of the tags with a synchronized PRNG - when a new session is established (through an ElGamal encrypted block), both sides seed a PRNG for use and generate the session tags on demand (with the recipient precalculating the next few possible values to handle out of order delivery).

Longer lasting tunnels

The current default tunnel duration of 10 minutes is fairly arbitrary, though it "feels okay". Once we've got tunnel healing code and more effective failure detection, we'll be able to more safely vary those durations, reducing the network and CPU load (due to expensive tunnel creation messages).

This appears to be an easy fix for high load on the big-bandwidth routers, but we should not resort to it until we've tuned the tunnel building algorithms further. However, the 10 minute tunnel lifetime is hardcoded in quite a few places, so substantial effort would be required to change the duration. Also, it would be difficult to maintain backward compatibility with such a change.

Currently, since the network average tunnel build success rate is fairly high, there are no current plans to extend tunnel lifetime.

Adjust the timeouts

Yet another of the fairly arbitrary but "okay feeling" things we've got are the current timeouts for various activities. Why do we have a 60 second "peer unreachable" timeout? Why do we try sending through a different tunnel that a LeaseSet advertises after 10 seconds? Why are the network database queries bounded by 60 or 20 second limits? Why are destinations configured to ask for a new set of tunnels every 10 minutes? Why do we allow 60 seconds for a peer to reply to our request that they join a tunnel? Why do we consider a tunnel that doesn't pass our test within 60 seconds "dead"?

Each of those imponderables can be addressed with more adaptive code, as well as tunable parameters to allow for more appropriate tradeoffs between bandwidth, latency, and CPU usage.

Full streaming protocol improvements

• Perhaps re-enable the interactive stream profile (the current implementation only uses the bulk stream profile).
• Client level bandwidth limiting (in either or both directions on a stream, or possibly shared across multiple streams). This would be in addition to the router's overall bandwidth limiting, of course.
• Access control lists (only allowing streams to or from certain other known destinations).
• Web controls and monitoring the health of the various streams, as well as the ability to explicitly close or throttle them.

Additional ideas for improving the streaming library are described on the streaming library page.