> My fundamental concern is the scalability of Freenet. Does Freenet scale > to the > extend that is can handle the bandwidth of Usenet? Can Freenet contain > the > more than 240,000,000 HTML pages (estimated by S. Lawrence, C.L. Giles) > of WWW?
Theoretically? Yes, I believe so. As long as we encourage document splitting for big documents, and document coalescing for really tiny ones (eg, combine short Usenet posts on high-traffic lists by buffering for N minutes or M bytes, whichever comes first). My biggest concern isn't whether the protocal can ramp up, but whether people will have enough incentive to put big nodes on Freenet, the way they do on the Web. My current thoughts on this suggest that it will be the Telecom industry, and not the end user, that will be the driving force behind a ramp-up of this sort. Why? More Freenet users means less bandwidth/user, as compared to HTTP and FTP. The better their Freenet caches are, the less infrastructure they need. (Of course, I thought the same thing about Web caches, and nothing came of that, but I think the dynamics of a web cache are a bit stickier). Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong. Jason _______________________________________________ Freenet-dev mailing list Freenet-dev at lists.sourceforge.net http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/freenet-dev
