Sitzprobe, noun: (from the German for seated rehearsal) is a rehearsal where the singers sing with the orchestra, focusing attention on integrating the two groups. It is often the first rehearsal where the orchestra and singers rehearse together. -Wikipedia

sitzprobe is a c-lightning plugin that actively sends test payments through the lightning network. The goal is to improve the health of the network by finding and deprecating channels that are not able to route payment.

Download the source and build it

git clone https://github.com/niftynei/sitzprobe.git
cd sitzprobe
go build

This should build a binary named sitzprobe. To run lightningd with sitzprobe enabled you can either add it to your lightningd/plugin directory, or pass it in as a runtime flag.

Option A: symlink to the lightningd plugin directory

ln -s sitzprobe /path/to/lightningd/sourcecode/plugin
# then run lightningd normally
./path/to/lightningd/sourcecode/lightningd/lightningd --sitzprobe-freq=20 --sitzprobe-amt=10

Option B: tell lightningd what plugins to use at runtime

lightningd --plugin=/path/to/sitzprobe --sitzprobe-freq=20 --sitzprobe-amt=10

sitzprobe provides two configurable options:

• --sitzprobe-amt: Amount to send as a test payment, in millisatoshi. Defaults to 1
• --sitzprobe-freq: How frequently to send a test payment, in minutes. Defaults to 60

sitzprobe provides a report functionality, to tell you how the payment attempts are working. You can get back a json formatted report by running sitzprobe-report.

lightning-cli sitzprobe-report

Pull requests, issues and feature requests welcome.