🤔 Frequently Asked Questions

How long does it take for a post to reach the most of the network?

Short answer

We don’t know yet, but very likely between 1-10 minutes. You should stay online for 5~ minutes or so after you post something so that your computer can spread it to other nodes.

Long answer

An Aether node attempts to establish an outbound connection every minute. It retains a neighbourhood of 10 remote nodes, each of which that it has prior sync history. In every tick (60 seconds), a remote is popped off that stack, synced with, and added to the bottom of the same stack again. In every 10 ticks, the oldest node in the stack is lobbed off, and a new, not-previously-synced node is inserted into the stack. That provides for some injection of fresh blood, and prevents forming of ‘closed loops’ where nodes in a neighbourhood only communicate with each other.

That means, on average, a node will be receiving an inbound sync a minute. ¹

This means, when you post something ², it should have left your computer in about a minute or so, on average.

To make this even faster, your computer ‘calls in’ other remote nodes to connect to it whenever you post something. Whenever they do, they get a copy of your new post. This happens a couple seconds after you post.

Nevertheless, let’s go by the averages. 1 minutes to first hop means the new post has left your computer and went to another node. Now, there are two nodes in the network delivering your post to everyone they connect to. This will make the third node be able to get your new post easier, fourth much easier, and so on — at every hop, the broadcast power of the post increases exponentially. After the first few hops, reaching the full network takes a very short amount of time.

Being very conservative, the full network penetration is somewhere around 1 to 10 minutes, and you can shut down your computer 5 minutes after you post and be reasonably sure that it has communicated.

Realistically, it will be something around 1 to 5 minutes to network penetration, and your new post will have left your computer in around 20 seconds or so.

This is something that needs to be tested live, so these are just approximates.

¹ Why? There are X nodes. Every one of them fire an outbound every minute, which is X outbound requests per minute. X/X = 1. In fact, it’s a little larger than one request in a minute, because some nodes are behind restrictive firewalls and NATs, and they cannot be reached, they can only make requests out.

² This does not include the time to mint the proof-of-work, i.e. it’s only counted after when the progress bar is complete.