[p2p-hackers] scalability (was: p2p framework)

[Serguei Osokine]

On Tuesday, November 29, 2005 Elias Sinderson wrote:
> The above represents a shift in scale of 3 orders of magnitude, 
> something gnutella is clearly not capable of.

	Oh, I dunno - last time Gnutella had scalability problems, it
was around 5K-10K nodes. After those problems were fixed, it started
growing without any meltdowns from thousands to millions of nodes.
These are the same three orders of magnuitude growth, and they were
fairly painless. Why not another three orders of magnitude?

	What is it that is clear to you about Gnutella that makes it
uncapable of growing a thousand more times?

	Best wishes -
	S.Osokine.
	29 Nov 2005.

-----Original Message-----
From: p2p-hackers-bounces at zgp.org [mailto:p2p-hackers-bounces at zgp.org]On
Behalf Of Elias Sinderson
Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2005 12:14 PM
To: Peer-to-peer development.
Subject: Re: [p2p-hackers] scalability (was: p2p framework)


Daniel Stutzbach wrote:

> I find it amusing when people claim a functioning 2-million peer 
> system doesn't scale. :-)

'Scalability' is relative, and the definition is often contingent upon 
the requirements of the system at hand. For example, an online banking 
application that could handle 2M active users would clearly be 
considered scalable enough for the application domain. However, when 
most people use the term these days, and especially with respect to P2P 
systems, they are using the term in reference to internet-scale 
scalability. To whit, while a 2M peer system may seem impressive at 
first blanche, a 20M peer system is better; a 200M peer system is _much_ 
better; a 2B peer system begins to approximate what we really want (at 
slightly less than half the size of the IPv4 address space).

The above represents a shift in scale of 3 orders of magnitude, 
something gnutella is clearly not capable of. In this sense, it is a 
tautology to say that gnutella doesn't scale. Sure, it may work well 
enough in a limited sense, but it is a fallacy to confuse that with true 
scalability. I mentioned the IPv4 address space, which is something like 
4.29B or so. This was thought to be more than enough addresses, yet now 
we find ourselves in the middle of shifting to IPv6, which has on the 
order of 3.4*10^38 addresses... Excessive, perhaps, but at least there's 
room to grow.  :-)

So, yes, Gnutella may scale well enough, but it clearly doesn't define 
(much loess aproach) scalability in any meaningful sense.


Regards,
Elias
_______________________________________________
p2p-hackers mailing list
p2p-hackers at zgp.org
http://zgp.org/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers
_______________________________________________
Here is a web page listing P2P Conferences:
http://www.neurogrid.net/twiki/bin/view/Main/PeerToPeerConferences