[aprssig] distributed findu possible ?

[Michael Conrad]

Hi all,

Arnie Shore wrote:
>     See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer
> for more than you probably want to know about it.   FWIW, which ain't
> all that much,
I tried to avoid the word "Peer-to-Peer", while most people associate
Peer-to-Peer with illegal file sharing rather than the possibility of
a (buzzwords on) highly scalable robust self-organizing (buzzwords off)
(and inexpensive) distributed system.

Steve Dimse wrote:
> It is easy to put a web server up on the net. It is very hard to put a  
> server that stays reliable under high load up on the net. The APRS  
> "old timers" will certainly verify that findU is far more reliable  
> than it was eight years ago when it began, despite a hundred-fold  
> increase in load. Interestingly, it is not the code I wrote that is  
> more reliable, it is my skill at managing a web server that is  
> responsible for the improvement.
> 
> It is much harder to administer a server reliably than I thought when  
> I started this. It has been a painful road without a lot to show for  
> it. I spend something like 20 hours a week administering the two  
> servers. I have almost no time to develop new features, because the  
> miserable task of keeping the servers running takes most of my free  
> time, and leaves me in such a bad mood I want to get as far away from  
> my keyboard as I can. If it wasn't for parental feelings towards my  
> creation I would have shut it off years ago.
When a critical mass of peers in a distributed findu network will exists,
you do not have such hard requirements for the availability of a single peer.
Some peers can fail, other peers are coming back and the whole system is
available all the time. In addition each peer only handles a fraction
of all requests, needs only a fraction of the overall bandwidth....

A dream would be, that each peer operator only invests one hour per month
to install new updates. If you have 100 active peers, this would be more
time than Steve has to invest each month, but it is better shared across
users.

Now, only some people are missed, willing to spend a lot of time to develop and
test such a system.


Greetings

    Michael

PS: Steve, I do not want be disrespectful to your work, only looking for alternatives,
    where the work- and moneyload is better shared across all users.