Reproduce Update Propagation Issues with Peer Blocking Tests

[devin-ai-integration]

Reproduce Update Propagation Issues with Peer Blocking Tests

Overview

This PR implements tests that successfully reproduce the update propagation issues seen in the live Freenet network. Using the peer blocking functionality from PR #1581, we've created tests that simulate a network where peers are connected through a gateway but not directly to each other, which better represents the topology of the live network.

Findings

Our tests confirm the hypothesis that updates and subscriptions are unreliable when peers are not directly connected:

1. In the standard test network, every peer connects to every other peer (densely connected)
2. In the live network, peers are often only indirectly connected through gateways
3. When using peer blocking to prevent direct connections, we observe the same update propagation failures seen in production

Specifically, we found that:

• Updates from Node1 often fail to reach Node2 through the Gateway
• The issue is intermittent, matching the behavior seen in the live network
• Multiple update attempts with increasing delays improve reliability but don't fully solve the issue

Implementation Details

This PR includes several test implementations:

1. run_app_blocked_peers.rs - Basic implementation of peer blocking test
2. run_app_blocked_peers_optimized.rs - Optimized version with reduced timeouts
3. run_app_blocked_peers_debug.rs - Enhanced logging for subscription operations
4. run_app_blocked_peers_reliable.rs - Multiple update rounds with increasing delays

Test Results

The debug test clearly shows the issue:

Node1 did not see Node2's update through Gateway

This matches the behavior reported in the live network where users cannot join rooms about 2/3 of the time.

Next Steps

Potential solutions to investigate:

1. Implement retry mechanisms for update propagation
2. Add explicit acknowledgment of updates between peers
3. Increase timeouts for update propagation in the gateway
4. Improve the subscription mechanism to be more resilient to network topology changes

Related Issues

This PR is related to the subscription reliability issues in the Freenet network, particularly in applications like River where users cannot join rooms reliably.

Link to Devin run

https://app.devin.ai/sessions/d77861025c92420e8806849f463924ef

Requested by: Ian Clarke (ian.clarke@gmail.com)

[devin-ai-integration]

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[iduartgomez]

This seems good first glancve, but there is a lot of new code here which seems redundant?:
would be nice to have a summary of what each test is testing and refactor common code where possible

[iduartgomez]

@sanity This seems good first glance, but there is a lot of new code here which seems redundant?

would be nice to have a summary of what each test is testing and refactor common code where possible

...

[iduartgomez]

I cleaned up quite a lot all this stuff and got it working, added the tests are ignored for now cause they are NOT passing and we need to fix em, but are useful for debugging.