Matthew Toseland wrote: > Only because they are over-reliant on both ubernodes and queueing, and are > rubbish for anything that isn't reasonably popular (e.g. look at bittorrent - > for less popular files it is usually hard to find a seed). They are therefore > more able to deal with low uptime nodes.
BitTorrent and Gnutella are currently more useful for rare content than Freenet, because they have more users. To attract more users you have to avoid pissing them off, and I believe a good way to do that is to behave like a normal app even though you'd prefer to run 24/7. > For Freenet, low uptime is a big deal. Churn is a big deal. I understand that, but retaining users is also a big deal. If you manage to attract a million users and 1% of them form a reliable, stable network, with the rest essentially acting as clients, then you're better off than you would be with a thousand users all of whom run stable nodes. Apart from anything else you'll have more content. That kind of user behaviour might not suit Freenet's design particularly well, but unfortunately that's the way P2P users behave. You can either design for reality or keep trying to force the users to behave differently, which will drive a lot of them away. > Having potentially > a different set of darknet peers for every user on the same computer is > insane (as well as broadcasting to the world who is logged in). Why is it insane for two users of the same computer to have different sets of friends? I see your point about broadcasting who's logged in, but that's an unavoidable aspect of darknets-over-public-networks: they reveal (a subset of) the social network to eavesdroppers. > - Data reachability: The node with the data we want may simply be offline > when > we are online, and then we'll never be able to find the data, at least not > unless somebody else requests it while we are offline, and moves it close > enough to us that our next request works. The BitTorrent/Gnutella solution to this problem is massive replication: it doesn't matter if there are 1,000 offline users with the data you want as long as there are a few online users. The best way to ensure that is to attract a lot of users. > - Download times: Because Freenet is relatively high overhead, routing > requests for many hops rather than contacting the source directly, and > because it is designed for security and tends to avoid bursts and ubernodes, > transfer rates are relatively low, and the proportion of incoming bandwidth > that is used to satisfy local requests is also relatively low (less than > 100%). This means that to fetch a big file (for example an ISO) can take > days, even if it isn't exceptionally unpopular. If the node is only online a > small fraction of the time, days become weeks... Fortunately P2P users mysteriously become capable of keeping their nodes online 24/7 when they have a download running. ;-) Cheers, Michael
