I don't think the problem with searching is "exponential growth" of the number of nodes searched (with increasing HTL).
Rather, it is "N squared growth" in the load on the network, where N is the number of nodes. With smart searches, the load on the network grows linearly with the number of nodes, as long as HTL remains constant. You put ten times as many nodes on the system, ten times the users, and you get ten times the traffic. (Actually you may have to increase the HTL somewhat for larger networks, so growth may be a little worse than linear.) This makes traffic per node approximately constant, independent of the size of the network. That's scalability. With broadcast searches, the load on the network grows as the square of the number of nodes, again assuming HTL remains constant. With ten times more nodes, you get 100 times the traffic. That means that traffic per node increases proportionally to the number of nodes in the system. That's not scalable, because at some size the load per node will simply be too great. I don't think the various optimizations suggested by Brandon will change this fundamental scaling factor. Even with caching and limited HTL values, you are still searching a certain percentage of the network, and there will still be N squared traffic load. Unless you can show that the percent of the network searched will DECREASE significantly as you go to larger networks, it won't change the basic conclusion. I think you need some quantitative analysis, even rough back of the envelope figures, to show that a broadcast search is scalable. Hal _______________________________________________ Freenet-dev mailing list Freenet-dev at lists.sourceforge.net http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/freenet-dev
