On Wed, 17 Sep 2003 12:20:04 +1200, David McNab wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I received an off-list reply suggesting I look at the 'Entropy' P2P
> network.
> 
> Very appealing at first glance - written in C (a major plus to have it
> in a native-compilable language), also FCP-compatibility supporting
> existing Freenet FCP clients.
> 
> Is there anyone here using both?

I tried to use entropy about half a year ago. (the prebuilt binary (cygwin)
on Windows ME). At first, installation and configuration (they have a
config servlet!) was simple. Running FIW though it failed of course (just
because of entropy: and the non-PAgM suffix (I cannot remember which one
they use). Inserting a simple file seemed to work and retrieving it again
worked as well. However i could not retrieve any "foreign" files at that
time. Additionally, Entropy tended to do heavy forking which is implemented
as "CreateProcess" in Cygwin. And these function is highly time-consuming
and eats lots of high-priority CPU time while it is in place (not to
compare with *nix forks...). Freenets threads (which are done via
CreateThread in java) are much better. 500 threads is no real problem, but
100 processes is the end for Windows ME...

And not being able to move my mouse smoothly while Entropy gets data does
not seem to work. Entropy did not work transient as well - so on my laptop
which is behind a NAT gateway I could not really use it (seems that he data
is sent back on incoming connections or sth like that).

Rewriting metadata dynamically fails for more complex things (DateRedirect
redirecting to a redirect to a mapfile - aka "indirect DBR mapfiles").

To make it clear, this is about half a year ago - maybe Entropy got better
since then (as freenet did).

> If so, can you offer any definitive opinions on matters like:
> 
> * strength of Entropy's anonymity, compared to Freenet

Dunno.

> * persistence of keys stored in Entropy (compared to Freenet, where keys
> can mysteriously drop into the bit bucket, even small keys, minutes or
> hours after insertion)

As I did not retrieve *anything* I cannot compare.

> * performance - times taken to insert/retrieve

dunno; infinity for retrieve; did only insert with HTL 0. OR code if not
FEC - maybe mixed with the data like RAID 5?)

> * popularity - is there a decent pool of Entropy nodes online at this
> stage?

The number of sites in Entropy is significantly smaller than that on
Freenet afaik - so i guess is it with the nodes.

> * anything else you can think of

Entropy does not use FEC for large files, but a 7-4 hamming code (where the
problem is that you cannot guarantee to be able to correct even 2 missing
blocks of 7...) which is much faster of course (I'd have used a simple XOR
like in RAID 5 if I could not use FEC...), but only splits into 7 parts
regardless how large the file is.

mihi

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