[sldev] P2P Web Textures now in demand to enable lossless image downloads to viewer

[Dirk Moerenhout]

On 7/10/07, Chance Unknown <chance at kalacia.com> wrote:
> this seems to be an overdesign to a problem that isnt present.

Best summary I've seen upto now.

Current bandwidth available from SL to me has never seemed to be
problematic (and I'm in Europe so not exactly close). A P2P network
would have to be very good for it to have any chance at beating that.
Peer selection algorithms would be a pain for example and the chances
that you find a high bandwidth peer are low. The overhead would kill
any chance at achieving something.

Why not just serve pointers to textures from sims and download all of
them using http? You can set up as many proxies as you want (both LL
and third party controlled). Sim hosters could easily set up their own
squid and have it prefetch the textures related to their sim. You
could for example allow proxies to send requests to a sim that ask it
to give all the currently active textures on a sim after which the
proxy can then autofeed itself in a timely manner from the main LL
servers. As such a community can run their own proxies and have their
own content served at high speeds (mostly interesting if the community
is focused on a specific rl geographic region).

In this way you could have ISP's even set up dedicated SL proxies
tuned specifically for caching SL content. Or you could move towards a
system where sims inform the client of dedicated proxies for that sim.

At all times the goal should remain to have a solution that works in a
simple, efficient way without too much overhead for peer or proxy
selection.

Dirk aka Blakar Ogre