I think that the reason we don't *keep* nodes at present is not the difficulty of getting peers (although that may cause a lot of peers to not join the network in the first place), it's that after going through the rituals of adding a few nodes, the network has very little content, and the newbies uninstall Freenet. The reason it has little content is not primarily because it is small, it is primarily that inserts are very slow. Inserts are very slow for various reasons: 1. Load balancing. 2. Bugs. 3. Inserts don't resume on restart. 4. Large freesites have issues. (Containers are limited to 2MB). 5. Survivability.
Nextgens is very keen on #3. He has convinced me, although it's only really an issue for largish files. There are a few minor things I need to do first on load balancing for example, but it's well up the priority list. #5 will be addressed by the new storage system, although we are reasonably good on #5 anyway. Fixing #1 properly requires completion of mrogers' load simulations. #2 is an ongoing issue. #4 is a big deal for freesites, but not for sharing of single files; but we all know that freesites are important. The other reason why people don't stay is that it's too much hassle to update your node when there has been a mandatory build and you managed to miss it. Their node doesn't offer them the option to update, and they don't know how to update manually, so they just let it go. The solution to this is update-over-mandatory support, or to not have mandatory builds, or to include support for downloading a new update from emu in the node. I believe we need mandatory builds to debug load balancing, if for no other reason. Downloading a new update from emu is possible, with sufficient warnings; of course it would put load on the mirrors, and of course emu can be spoofed or cracked. Update over mandatory is also possible, and nextgens has made some steps towards it in recent days (N2NTMs over connections to incompatible nodes). What remains to be done is packaging a file into a verifiable bag of keys, allowing nodes to tell other nodes about the latest update, transfer the data, and tell each other when the revocation key has been cracked. We can mitigate the effects of mandatory updates through time-bomb builds (this build will become mandatory at time X), but we will always need some. -- Matthew J Toseland - toad at amphibian.dyndns.org Freenet Project Official Codemonkey - http://freenetproject.org/ ICTHUS - Nothing is impossible. Our Boss says so. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/tech/attachments/20060711/de20b499/attachment.pgp>
