Sorry for wasting bandwidth with this, but I have another theoretical question about the Freenet design. Feel free to point me toward TFM to R if this is answered elsewhere. :^)
1) What causes specialisation in nodes? Is the "specialisation" area "picked" by a node using some method, e.g. most frequently used parts of key space, as perceived by the node through incoming requests, or is it merely amplified from random artefact clustering around certain parts of the key space? 2) If the node is started and never used, does it only ever acquire files through inserts performed on other nodes? If a node is empty (and this would imply lack of any specialisation), how/why does it ever get inserts/requests routed to it? 3) Is probabalistic caching is used to amplify specialisation? From previous discussion, I seem to remember it being said that a node will cache everything until the space runs out, at which point it will start to drop data using "probabalistic caching". How is this traded off between maintaining specialisation in parts of key space and caching the "most popular" data? The two can contradict each other, e.g. the least frequently/recently used file can be in the key space of strong, narrow specialisation. 4) If a very large data store is used, then the "cache everything" method sounds like it may get in the way of reinforced specialisation of a node. According to observations of size of my own data store, once the node is integrated into the network (few days), the data growth seems to decay exponentially, from a peak of about 1GB/day. A quick calculation, given the data growth pattern I have seen, seems to imply a rate of about 100GB/year (from empty, in the first year, obviously less thereafter if the pattern holds). How are such "heavy" nodes treated by the network, given their lack of specialisation? Is there a provision for "generalist" rather than specialist nodes? Perhaps by being used as "good but slow, so don't route there first" nodes? This could potentially slow the rate at which the data falls out of the network, and make a compromise between fast and reliable retrieval of popular data and slow and mostly reliable retrieval of old or unpopular data. How would a big node gain specialisation without it's data store getting completely filled up, other than by coincidence? How do non-specialised nodes get requests routed to them? Is it only a matter of last resort, i.e. "I have some routing requests left, and none of the other more specialised nodes found the data, so I'll have a go asking this node even though it doesn't look like it's area of specialisation"? Thanks. Gordan _______________________________________________ Devl mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://dodo.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devl
