Scott and Oskar, I'm really touched in your faith in the current routing mechanism, but I think that if you ignore the physical network Freenetruns on, it will never be more than an interesting experiment. We claim that Freenet moves information to where it is most wanted, as an example we say a piece of information originating in the States only needs to cross the Atlantic once. However if we route completely independant from the physical network the 'closest' node could be some highschool kids dial-up connection in Hawaii. So all the traffic would end up crossing the Passific!
Before a line of code was even written we were discussing this problem and agreed some sort of refinement of the closseness metric would eventually be necesary to take the physical network into account. Ping speeds where mentionend the layout of the IP addresses (favoring nodes on your local subnet) and raw Speeds. In my view the routing mechanism translates to find the best node to forward the request to, and do this consequently.However a good Node is not determined by keyspace specialization alone, there are more factors like speed, datastore size, its connectedness to the rest of Freenet and probably some more. A couple of weeks ago I suggested using 2 or 3 parralel requests, and storing the first reply as the reference this means all the factors mentioned above are taken into account in determining the best node. Ian picked up on this an refined ot to 2 requestst some of the time (random forking). In a mature network this might suffice, but I'm not sure we need to be so stingy regarding requests I mean Gnuttella does broadcasts for Buddah's sake! The advantage of using paralel requests all of the time is that it reduces the effect off nodes dissapearing. Neil _______________________________________________ Freenet-dev mailing list Freenet-dev at lists.sourceforge.net http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/freenet-dev
