Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: Napster meeting today
Author: Ian Beatty Posted: 6/20/2000; 8:52:45 AM Topic: Napster meeting today Msg #: 17941 (In response to 17927) Prev/Next: 17940 / 17942
Thinking about Napster as a many-to-many scheme for sharing electronic resources (not just music, ultimately): I'm wondering how well the scheme will scale as it becomes more widely used.If I do a search on a file/song and the Napster server tells me there are N other people out there with the file available for downloading, my Napster client then queries each one to find out if it's up, how quick the connection is, etc.
N scales as the number of users of the system, presumably. So does the number of people making queries. So it seems that the amount of network traffic, at least the part leading up to downloads, could scale as the square of the number of participants. Which could be bad news for networks. Imagine an internet where a large, large fraction of netizens are using Napster-like (Gnutella-like?) schemes for sharing music, movies, news, games, and Murphy-knows what else. Problem?
--Ian
This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:55:26 PM.
© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.