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Subject: Global-Scale Distributed Storage Systems

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  • From: hal AT finney.org
  • To: bluesky AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: Scalability
  • Date: Sun, 25 Feb 2001 20:10:55 -0800


One of the controversial technical issues in P2P development is
scalability. Recently a paper by one of the Napster technical leads [1]
analyzed the behavior of a Gnutella network mathematically and found that
it would not scale up to the size of Napster (target of 1 million users).
There was some discussion on Slashdot [2] and a rebuttal [3] offered by
a developer of the Gnutella client LimeWire. Basically he argued that
Gnutella searches would only try to reach a few thousand nodes regardless
of how many are on the network, which would reduce its usefulness IMO.

Are there inherent scalability issues with P2P networks? Freenet goes
to some lengths to try to locate data while using only a small amount of
network traffic. This is intended to avoid the need for a centralized
database of where all data is stored.

Another strategy is be to use a decentralized database which indexes the
data, which I think is how MojoNation works, using "content trackers"
which any peer node can run. However this raises the issue of how you
locate the index nodes. MojoNation has a MetaTracker which I think is
there to help you find content trackers. The MetaTracker is currently
centralized but I believe they plan to make it decentralized, but
then how will you find them? And what will qualify a node to operate
a MetaTracker?

I'd like to see discussion of technical solutions to the problems of
finding data without swamping the network. It would be especially good
if this could handle a search search, something that Freenet does not
even try to tackle yet. Mojo handles searching using the same content
trackers that store file locations.

Hal

[1] http://www.monkey.org/~dugsong/mirror/gnutella.html
[2] http://slashdot.org/articles/01/02/14/190225.shtml
[3] http://www.gnutellanews.com/article.html?id=4206




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