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Subject: Global-Scale Distributed Storage Systems

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  • From: Anthony Jones <ajones AT clear.net.nz>
  • To: Global-Scale Distributed Storage Systems <bluesky AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: Grapevine Technical Overview
  • Date: Thu, 23 May 2002 23:40:32 +0800


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On Thursday 23 May 2002 04:56, you wrote:
> 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 :-).

Anonymity is fine by me. That's the whole point of Grapevine.

> <>
> > 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.

Freenet definitely works very well in simulation, as it would on an ideal
network. In the real world it does not work at the moment. This does not mean
that it can't be made to work. On paper it is more efficient than Grapevine.

Grapevine is based very heavily upon our experiences with Freenet. I feel
that we've taken the good ideas from Freenet and that we've addressed some of
it's deficiencies. We even discussed leveraging the existing Freenet codebase
(or perhaps the C++ port) when we first talked about doing the project. I
would like to thank everyone who worked on Freenet for the inspiration it has
given our project.

I don't expect anyone to take Grapevine all that seriously until we've got
something to show for ourselves. I am very pleased with the feedback that
we've had from posting to this list - even though a lot of it has been very
negative. I have been made aware of many potential problems that may have
otherwise gone un-noticed.

If we can get to the stage where even one of these project really works then
we can all learn a lot by the successes and failures of the project, as we
have with Gnutella, Napster and so on.

Anthony
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