A master model is not necessarily slower. Everything goes through the server either way, and it comes down to how much data you have to transmit and how much th

A master model is not necessarily slower. Everything goes through the server either way, and it comes down to how much data you have to transmit and how much the sender, server, and receiver have to process it. At http://draftastic.com/ http://draftastic.com/ we keep a master but only broadcast changed portions -- a compromise between re-sending the whole document and handling a hail of tiny diffs. This uses automatic locking, which we thought was reasonable given that people rarely want to type directly on top of each other, but it means a much simpler implementation of undo and so on. Basically, we've made a heartbeat-based system with heartbeats so cheap that they can be fast, and we never need a merge algorithm. In any case, I'll be watching the just-raw-edits approach with interest. Best of luck to Etherpad -- there's plenty of room in the market.