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bluesky - Re: Grapevine Technical Overview

bluesky AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Global-Scale Distributed Storage Systems

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  • 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: Thu, 23 May 2002 18:25:40 +0200


On Thu, May 23, 2002 at 11:40:32PM +0800, Anthony Jones wrote:
> On Thursday 23 May 2002 04:56, you wrote:
< >
> > 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.

The implementation is a lot more than just the routing algorithm. I
would argue that the routing is not being tested one way or the other
"in the real world" at the moment, because other parts of the
implementation have failed to give it a chance.

It would be very easy to have a network implementation fall over even if
the routing algorithm were deterministic and (in controlled conditions)
100% successful. In fact, the situation may in many ways be worse for
such a network, since freenet can route around moderate numbers of nodes
that come in and out of eligibility due to overload, whereas a fixed
mesh network would need to do an expensive remap every time it happened
(in a Plaxton based network I could easily see this leading to an evil
circle).

> 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'm not trying to put down grapevine, I don't agree with your technical
choices, but your goals are as laudable as any, so I would not
particularly mind being wrong.

<>
--

Oskar Sandberg
oskar AT freenetproject.org




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