5 ms·

The Wikipedia page for Operational Transformation [1] mentions Differential Synchronization [2] as an alternative, does anyone have any experience with DS? [1]

• zknill 3y ago
  When you search for usage of Differential Sync you'll find lots of news reports about it being included as technology in file sync and file backup solutions. I've not directly worked on it, but I get the impression that it's mostly used in file backup because of how Differential Sync works. In Differential Sync the server and the client both hold two copies of the data/document. One representing their own state, and one representing what they thing the other's state is. Then the differences are computed between those documents and sent to the other. For any given client, this isn't too onerous. You'd have to hold the client and server copy of the doc. But for a server, serving many clients, you'll end up with a lot of client-specific copies of that document. For N clients, you'd have N+1 copies of the document. It doesn't take too many clients before this becomes a real problem. So if you're backing up 1 client to 1 server, Differential Sync is fine. But if you're trying to keep tens, hundreds, or thousands of clients in sync then you end up with a lot of client "shadow" copies of the server's document.