| libtorrent

# libtorrent hacking

Author: | Arvid Norberg, arvid@libtorrent.org
Version: | 1.2.16

Table of contents

- terminology
- structure
  - session_impl
  - session
  - torrent_handle
  - torrent
  - peer_connection
  - peer_list
  - piece_picker
  - torrent_info
- threads
- disk cache

This describe some of the internals of libtorrent. If you're looking for something to contribute, please take a look at the todo list.

# terminology

This section describes some of the terminology used throughout the libtorrent source. Having a good understanding of some of these keywords helps understanding what's going on.

A piece is a part of the data of a torrent that has a SHA-1 hash in the .torrent file. Pieces are almost always a power of two in size, but not necessarily. Each piece is split up in blocks, which is a 16 kiB. A block never spans two pieces. If a piece is smaller than 16 kiB or not divisible by 16 kiB, there are blocks smaller than that.

16 kiB is a de-facto standard of the largest transfer unit in the bittorrent protocol. Clients typically reject any request for larger pieces than this.

The piece picker is the part of a bittorrent client that is responsible for the logic to determine which requests to send to peers. It doesn't actually pick full pieces, but blocks (from pieces).

The file layout of a torrent is represented by file storage objects. This class contains a list of all files in the torrent (in a well defined order), the size of the pieces and implicitly the total size of the whole torrent and number of pieces. The file storage determines the mapping from pieces to files. This representation may be quite complex in order to keep it extremely compact. This is useful to load very large torrents without exploding in memory usage.

A torrent object represents all the state of swarm download. This includes a piece picker, a list of peer connections, file storage (torrent file). One important distinction is between a connected peer (peer_connection) and a peer we just know about, and may have been connected to, and may connect to in the future (torrent_peer). The list of (not connected) peers may grow very large if not limited (through tracker responses, DHT and peer exchange). This list is typically limited to a few thousand peers.

The peer_list maintains a potentially large list of known peers for a swarm (not necessarily connected).

# structure

This is the high level structure of libtorrent. Bold types are part of the public interface:

## session_impl

This is the session state object, containing all session global information, such as:

> - the list of all torrents `m_torrent`.
> - the list of all peer connections `m_connections`.
> - the global rate limits `m_settings`.
> - the DHT state `m_dht`.
> - the port mapping state, `m_upnp` and `m_natpmp`.

## session

This is the public interface to the session. It implements pimpl (pointer to implementation) in order to hide the internal representation of the `session_impl` object from the user and make binary compatibility simpler to maintain.

## torrent_handle

This is the public interface to a `torrent`. It holds a weak reference to the internal `torrent` object and manipulates it by sending messages to the network thread.

## torrent

## peer_connection

## peer_list

## piece_picker

## torrent_info

# threads

libtorrent starts 3 to 5 threads.

> - The first thread is the main thread that will sit idle in a `select()` call most of the time. This thread runs the main loop that will send and receive data on all connections. In reality it's typically not actually in `select()`, but in `kqueue()`, `epoll_wait()` or `poll`, depending on operating system.
> - The second thread is the disk I/O thread. All disk read and write operations are passed to this thread and messages are passed back to the main thread when the operation completes.
> - The third thread is the SHA-1 hash thread. By default there's only one hash thread, but on multi-core machines downloading at very high rates, libtorrent can be configured to start any number of hashing threads, to take full use of multi core systems. (see settings_pack::aio_threads).
> - The fourth and fifth threads are spawned by asio on systems that don't support asynchronous host name resolution, in order to simulate non-blocking `getaddrinfo()`.

# disk cache

The disk cache implements ARC, Adaptive Replacement Cache. This consists of a number of LRUs:

1. LRU L1 (recently used)
2. LRU L1 ghost (recently evicted)
3. LRU L2 (frequently used)
4. LRU L2 ghost (recently evicted)
5. volatile read blocks
6. write cache (blocks waiting to be flushed to disk)

These LRUs are stored in `block_cache` in an array `m_lru`.

The cache algorithm works like this:

    if (L1->is_hit(piece)) {
            L1->erase(piece);
            L2->push_back(piece);
    } else if (L2->is_hit(piece)) {
            L2->erase(piece);
            L2->push_back(page);
    } else if (L1->size() == cache_size) {
            L1->pop_front();
            L1->push_back(piece);
    } else {
            if (L1->size() + L2->size() == 2*chache_size) {
                    L2->pop_front();
            }
            L1->push_back(piece);
    }

It's a bit more complicated since within L1 and L2 in this pseudo code have to separate the ghost entries and the in-cache entries.

Note that the most recently used and more frequently used pieces are at the back of the lists. Iterating over a list gives you low priority pieces first.

In libtorrent pieces are cached, not individual blocks, a single peer would typically trigger many cache hits when downloading a piece. Since ARC is sensitive to extra cache hits (a piece is moved to L2 the second time it's hit) libtorrent only move the cache entry on cache hits when it's hit by another peer than the last peer that hit it.

Another difference compared to the ARC paper is that libtorrent caches pieces, which aren't necessarily fully allocated. This means the real cache size is specified in number of blocks, not pieces, so there's not clear number of pieces to keep in the ghost lists. There's an `m_num_arc_pieces` member in `block_cache` that defines the arc cache size, in pieces, rather than blocks.