Networking

BNDL nodes form fully interconnected clusters through seed nodes and gossip. They communicate over TCP. See Getting started and Configuration on how to configure seed nodes (and listen addresses)

The networking part of the stack is built with asyncio so it consumes one thread to do the network IO. Serialization in the network protocol is based on marshal.dumps, if the data to be sent can be marshalled, or pickle.dumps if not. If even pickle fails using a cythonized version of cloudpickle is attempted. The protocol itself is framed with a length field and includes one flag for whether the marshal was used or not (pickle being the only other option).