4 ms·

Im not up to date on webtorrent, but if it catches on does that mean a good chunk of the Inter net could be freed from cdns?

moomin 6y ago
An interesting question, but I worry about the latency overhead of a peer-to-peer system. I'd be happy to be completely wrong about this, though.
toyg 6y ago
unlikely. Torrents are slower, in most scenarios, than straight HTTP. With small files, they generate more traffic for chatting/handshaking than the file is actually worth. It could however lower costs for people who distribute large files, where the final user can tolerate some download latency. I'm thinking browser games that can download a big archive via torrent on first launch, similarly to what Steam does now in their client.
- pantaloony 6y ago
  A large majority of web clients must be operating on battery now, too. Willingness to burn battery participating in Torrent and other distributed protocols rather than HTTP will be low among those, let alone willingness to leave such a thing operating as a daemon in the background. It’s why I don’t see much future for these things (distributed file-sharing protocols) except in infrastructure or in applications where many users may be expected to be on desktop.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    Conversely, every home router or NAS can act as a node in the mesh.
    - bentcorner 6y ago
      With data caps I'm not sure if home users have an appetite for that either.
      - rohan1024 6y ago
        Someone needs to create an app so awesome that the only way to join it is to contribute to it. Hopefully that will happen in my lifetime.
    - indolering 6y ago
      But they are highly resource constrained and if there is no direct benefit to the consumer, why throw that in?
- indolering 6y ago
  It would help lessen the cost of bandwidth for servers and smaller ISPs, as traffic is very expensive for anyone that isn't Comcast: saturating a 1 Gigabit line can cost an ISP ~$1K/month!

moomin 6y ago

An interesting question, but I worry about the latency overhead of a peer-to-peer system. I'd be happy to be completely wrong about this, though.

toyg 6y ago

unlikely. Torrents are slower, in most scenarios, than straight HTTP. With small files, they generate more traffic for chatting/handshaking than the file is actually worth. It could however lower costs for people who distribute large files, where the final user can tolerate some download latency. I'm thinking browser games that can download a big archive via torrent on first launch, similarly to what Steam does now in their client.

pantaloony 6y ago
A large majority of web clients must be operating on battery now, too. Willingness to burn battery participating in Torrent and other distributed protocols rather than HTTP will be low among those, let alone willingness to leave such a thing operating as a daemon in the background. It’s why I don’t see much future for these things (distributed file-sharing protocols) except in infrastructure or in applications where many users may be expected to be on desktop.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  Conversely, every home router or NAS can act as a node in the mesh.
  - bentcorner 6y ago
    With data caps I'm not sure if home users have an appetite for that either.
    - rohan1024 6y ago
      Someone needs to create an app so awesome that the only way to join it is to contribute to it. Hopefully that will happen in my lifetime.
  - indolering 6y ago
    But they are highly resource constrained and if there is no direct benefit to the consumer, why throw that in?
indolering 6y ago
It would help lessen the cost of bandwidth for servers and smaller ISPs, as traffic is very expensive for anyone that isn't Comcast: saturating a 1 Gigabit line can cost an ISP ~$1K/month!