4 ms·
There is one missing piece to all this, I/O. Given they publish their apps on all platforms they could probably add this in the future as an ssd or PCIe storag
by nisten 7y ago
There is one missing piece to all this, I/O.
Given they publish their apps on all platforms they could probably add this in the future as an ssd or PCIe storage tier by doing regular disk benchmarks.
However it seems like a major limiting factor, given that random access speeds on spinning drives or even cheap ssds can drop drastically by an order or two of magnitude (i.e. from 130MB/s to 2MB/s).
Given how they're doing error correction in a distributed manner, having a fast storage tier would be a major advantage for them which would eliminate any problems from flash storage wearing out and fully gain the benefit of throughput, random access times and cheap new prices of nvme drives.
At the moment I probably can't use this for streaming my own 4k videos to myself because an up to 300mbps network is not good enough for that, the slowest storage in it would be a bottleneck for a significant amounts of the experience of watching the streamed file.
And I definitely can't use it for application storage given how important response time is to the user experience and user growth.
That all aside, those 2 are relatively extreme examples and there's a lot of usage scenarios in between them.
I do admire how far they've gotten this given all the blockchain hyped products that have failed. They seem to have a solid system here that will only improve on performance and put pressure on bringing online storage prices down.
- Taek 7y agoMost 4K video is closer to 50mbps. If your home connection is that fast, Sia should be more than capable of delivering smooth 4K streaming to your home. A single host with slow storage is not a blocking factor because Sia downloads in parallel from as many as 30 hosts at once when composing a stream of data. Even if each has an I/O bottleneck of 1 MB/s (8mbps), you'll be able to get your video out at 240mbps. In practice today, Sia hosts are almost all network bottlenecked, most use HDDs which do not have trouble keeping up with network latencies (HDD seek times are 11ms, network latencies usually 50ms+) or throughputs (HDDs can usually get close to 100 MB/s, far more than the network throughput) Can I ask, have you tried streaming 4K video from the latest version of Sia? Seek times might be 5-10 seconds, but I believe that once your stream has loaded you will see completely smooth playback. Our next release has a focus on reducing those seek times, but the code is not ready yet.
- nisten 7y agoThat's interesting, and very informative thanks. No I have not tried it however, based on your information, this looks ideal for something like showing auto-playing video on a splash screen using your API to pull the file on the client side. /renter/stream/*siapath [GET]