On Tue, Jul 01, 2003 at 04:39:22PM -0400, Nick Tarleton wrote:
> On Tuesday 01 July 2003 04:18 pm, Toad wrote:
> > We can prefetch the front page links on startup.
> The mapfiles and ActiveLinks, or the whole sites? If the last, then 
> low-bandwidth users will be horribly annoyed. If there's a config option for 
> what to preload, it should NOT default to 'whole site', as new users probably 
> won't mess with their config beyond the bare minimum that early.

Only a problem if they are "low bandwidth users". Who are probably the
minority and shouldn't be running permanent nodes. I wonder if we can
detect modem users somehow... we could use that information...
> 
> Prefetching the mapfiles however would be wonderful no matter how you're 
> connected.

Indeed. The original idea was to just fetch the linked pages in the
background i.e. the manifest file and then the index page. Prefetching
too many files could cause excessive network load, especially if it was
done every day, at the time when there is most traffic anyway i.e. the
clock rollover... On the other hand, it would probably be a good idea to
prefetch both the initial frames on TFEE, for example. One obvious
possibility would be to have a general purpose prefetch system where
some metadata in freenet keys indicates pages to prefetch, with some
sort of queue (a stack seems the obvious thing), and the load caused by
prefetching is kept under control by never doing more than a certain
small number of requests (e.g. 1) at once (this is the approach already
taken by the background splitfile healing code). 

There is also an argument for implementing a pool of requests with some
sort of priority system so that when the node is idle it prefetches more,
and when you do 10 splitfile downloads, they all use fewer threads 
automatically, but when you only have 1 running, it automatically grabs
as many request "threads" as are available (leaving a few for browsing).
However you still have to consider overall network effects - doing 50
thread prefetch when idle for half an hour would almost certainly be 
disastrous. So perhaps low priority items would only ever have a few
requests allocated to them. The splitfile "threads" side is the most
interesting here, which is also significant for new users.
-- 
Matthew J Toseland - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Freenet Project Official Codemonkey - http://freenetproject.org/
ICTHUS - Nothing is impossible. Our Boss says so.

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