[p2p-hackers] Keep Alive and network performance

[Matthew Gertner]

Hi,

We have a straightforward P2P topology with each peer in the network 
attached to hub. We want to detect efficiently that a peer has 
disconnected from the hub. The obvious way to do this would be to use 
our current TCP connection with a relatively short Keep Alive value (a 
few seconds so we could see the peer's presence updated quickly if they 
don't disconnect cleanly). Does anyone have a feeling for the 
performance implications of this approach if many peers are attached to 
a single hub? Is there another approach that is recommend (such as using 
a custom UDP-based keep alive protocol)?

Regards,
Matt