Circling back to your original question, to the network at large it indeed doesn't really matter how often you update your channels, since your peers will act as a buffer and coalesce any redundant updates on 60-seconds windows. However, if you get really spammy about it and keep sending updates every second, your peers might want to rate-limit or blacklist you.
Now for a channel update to be effective, you want it to reach the nodes that might try to route through said channel. Only then can you start to observe if the channel update leads to any change in behaviour and, if it's still not what you expected, update the channel again. In other words, if you update your channels to frequently, the risk is that you don't let enough time for the new information to reach other nodes, and hence the update will appear to you as not having resulted in the expected change in routing flow, but that may only because the update hasn't actually propagated yet.
To put yet in other words: if you update your channel parameter based on the observation of the routing flow in your channel, then you need to wait enough time for any update to propagate before assessing whether this update had the desired effects or not.
Through this lens, I'd say there's definitely a propagation aspect to it, since updates that are so frequent they don't let enough time for previous updates to propagate don't seem very useful to me (unless it's just to amend a mistake/typo made in a previous update, of course).
Any subsequent update will always be more accurate than the previous update. Also you dont need the update to propagate through the entire network for it to be useful. Every new node that receives it along the way creates a higher percentage of the network using the new parameters.
In any case, the use case in my head is more for adjusting rates on wildy fluctuating channels (not for making minor adjustments). For instance consider you open a channel to a sink and they suck all the liquidity to their side straight away, so theres no more routing capacity in that direction. You'll want a fast and severe increase in fees on that channel to prevent any more nodes from trying to send funds that way. So in that way it helps the network at large because there should be less failed attempts to route payments.
With the current LND autoloop, you'd be waiting 3 days for an update and it would only be a percentage of the median change in liquidity across all your channels (or something like that, i cant remember it exactly of the top of my head). So meaningful change on a completely exhausted channel will likely take several cycles of fee adjustments.
Does any of that make sense?
reply
Oh yes, definitely makes sense! When such drastic changes occur, you want to adapt your fees asap.
Also, I just noticed you were talking about autoloop, but I guess you meant autofees?
reply
Yeah that's right, I meant to say autofees.
Thanks for the chat! ๐Ÿ‘
Oh just saw your at LNMarkets. Nice work, hope you guys are still kicking goals over there!
reply
Thank you! Things are going pretty great, and we have some big announcement coming soonโ„ข ๐Ÿ˜‰
reply