[sldev] P2P/Squid Web Textures: Enabling Greater Quality Images - draft 2

Dzonatas dzonatas at dzonux.net
Sat Jul 7 15:12:36 PDT 2007


I originally jotted down the ideas based on a collection full of talk 
and data. I thought I was pretty darn clear about "subject to change."

Yes, torrents are mentioned but it does not have to be BitTorrent; 
however, it would be easier to use something that already exists just to 
get the proof-of-concept done before we roll our own.

BitTorrent uses connectionless transfers and peer discovery. That by 
itself is the main reason why it is slow to initiate transfers. If it 
kept active connections of peers, it would be much quicker without 
initial transfer time slowdown. There should be an option who stays 
active and who doesn't gets treated like normal BitTorrent client. 
Everybody else without a client uses the http method to get files. This 
can all be combine into a Squid cache.

It would be nice to have one viewer connect directly to another. It 
would be easier to allow these viewers to talk to a Squid to find out 
who has just seen certain textures recently in order to get the textures 
from them, if it is enabled on those viewers. That way, even if a ton of 
people aren't in the same sim can still access the tracker to find the 
texture.

Remember, we can make these things optional.

Why don't we just put an apache server into the viewer, then we can just 
simply http redirect viewers that don't have a texture to viewers that 
do have a texture. =p

I can think of a few websites that would love to host these textures.

Again, if all external hosts go down for some odd reason, I believe I 
did mention about a "fallback" option for the worst-case.

Of course, the sim needs a copy of the texture, especially for sculpties 
and its physics even if it never sends it to a viewer.

-- 
Power to Change the Void


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