On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 12:03:07 +0000, Tony Garnock-Jones tonyg@lshift.net wrote:
Okay. I'll have to do a bit of digging to find out how messages are routed to the two hits - 30 seconds seems like a loooooong time, so I guess I need to learn more about how the p2p network works to understand why 30 seconds isn't practically infinity.
It is. If the thing works, I found it much faster than SqueakSource in responsiveness and comparable to an average remote repository.
In fact I'll, just as an experiment, try setting it to 300 seconds and see what happens.
Nothing. I think the nodes that claimed to have the file you wanted simply weren't available. That's why network size matters here. And stable code, of course ;)
Agreed :) How does bittorrent do its thing, I wonder? I did read the protocol description once many moons ago but it didn't stick, clearly...
Bittorrent asks lots of peers for blocks, I think. With direct connections, there's no peer-to-peer routing of payload as far as I'm aware. Gnutella does p2p routing of "metadata" (searches and responses), but not of data - actual files are transported out-of-band with direct HTTP-ish connections. Something I'd like to postpone as long as possible ;) (I think for large files, say >>100k, things should be splitup in blocks and one could retrieve individual blocks).
Anyway, I think that the mod where you ask for a 'file handle' or 'transfer handle' to a peer first is probably the most sensible thing to change on the current implementation.