Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

bluesky - Re: Grapevine Technical Overview

bluesky AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Global-Scale Distributed Storage Systems

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Oskar Sandberg <oskar AT freenetproject.org>
  • To: Global-Scale Distributed Storage Systems <bluesky AT franklin.metalab.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: Grapevine Technical Overview
  • Date: Wed, 22 May 2002 22:56:33 +0200


On Wed, May 22, 2002 at 12:39:37PM -0700, Bram Cohen wrote:
> Someone sent me this from an anonymous email account, asking me to forward
> it to the list, since bluesky isn't set up to accept anonymous mail.

Ah, of course, your anonymous friend. My anonymous friend has some
responses :-).

<>
> Jim McCoy writes:
> > Part of my curiosity about Grapevine is that it seems to be a weird
> > hybrid of MojoNation/Mnet and Freenet. I am still trying to figure
> > out what problems it solves that are not already solved by one or the
> > other system.
>
> Freenet doesn't work. The theory has never been verified and in practice
> it runs as a full broadcast network. It has long passed the point of
> scalability and is now completely unusable. Most nodes are instantly
> rejecting 99%+ of requests because they are overloaded.

The routing lacks a strict mathematical proof (though there has been
some rather heuristic hand-waving regarding small world networks), but
there is an abundance of experimental evidence that indicates that it
does work at least to some extent (I think I know of at least 5
independent groups that have simulated it, and each has come to this
conclusion). Whether that can be considered verification is a personal
choice of course, I would probably say no, but I have never been able to
convince myself that it cannot work either.

The current attempt at a real world implementation is indeed at the
moment suffering from tremendous overload that is keeping it from
functioning at all. However, it would be incorrect to blame this problem
on the scaling of the routing - the current implementation is limited in
search length, so evidence of a scalability limit would be seen as
decreased performance not as increased traffic. The cause of the problem
at the moment seems to be a combination of inefficient software, lack of
a compelling reason for users to share resources, and/or deliberate
flooding.

> MojoNation never worked either.
>
> Even if Grapevine does no more than what Freenet and MonoJantion promised
> to do, it will be a huge step forward if it actually succeeds.

If Grapevine does it FIRST, then it will be a huge step forward (maybe).
We are all vapourware here...

< >
> > This is the hard part for decentralized networks and one which I think
> > than Freenet work solved better than others. Information about
> > proposed solutions to the decentralized search problem would be really
> > appreciated.
>
> On the contrary, Freenet has no capabilities for search, and has no
> design for search that anyone agrees is likely to work.

This is pretty true, though there is some interesting work on the topic
published here:

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~akronfol/fasd/

--

Oskar Sandberg
oskar AT freenetproject.org




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page