I have been asked to forward the following message to the list as the author wishes to remain anonymous.
-- Hello - I wonder if you could submit this message to the dev list for discussion? Given my current circumstances, anonymity is my preferred mode for communication. Thanks very much. Greetings. As a newcomer to Freenet I am excited by its possibilities but discouraged by its apparent difficulties. Here is a possibly dumb idea for a "silver bullet" that could help with the overloaded condition. It may be stupid, but is it stupid enough to be right? In some sense, overload is a self-perpetuating state. A node cannot respond to messages if all the nodes it is querying are not responding. So each node stops responding since there is nothing it can do. However of course there are certain messages it can deal with: those with HTL=0. It would not be forwarding those anyway, so it could respond to those right away no matter how badly overloaded the other nodes are. So we could give HTL=0 messages priority so that they are handled first. This would help slightly. Then there are HTL=1 messages. These will typically require forwarding. And if we have made the above change, then when we decrement the HTL to 0 and forward them, the other nodes will respond even if they are overloaded. So we can handle HTL=1 messages reasonably well, and they should have a relatively high priority. You can see where I am going with this. Messages should be handled in priority inversely to HTL. HTL=0 messages should always be handled immediately. HTL=1 should be handled with high priority. HTL=2 with somewhat less, and so on. This would have the beneficial side effect of penalizing people who send in messages with too high HTL, which hurt the network by making it into a flat, unspecialized broadcast network. The problem with the idea is that it's not clear how to put a priority system on top of what is essentially a first come, first served model. However it seems that most nodes are not operating in that state now, but are rejecting almost all messages. If we are in the state where we are rejecting messages because of "overload", let us never reject HTL=0 and reduce the chances of rejecting low HTL messages proportionately to the HTL value. This could help drain the network of backed-up messages and deadlocked loops and could free things up to a significant degree. Maybe it's worth a try? ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Ian Clarke [EMAIL PROTECTED] Founder & Coordinator, The Freenet Project http://freenetproject.org/ Chief Technology Officer, Uprizer Inc. http://www.uprizer.com/ Personal Homepage http://locut.us/ _______________________________________________ devl mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hawk.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devl
