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I don't see how the tent protocol has any hope of scaling to large numbers of users / servers. The notification traffic for anyone with a significant number of
by EvanAnderson 14y ago
I don't see how the tent protocol has any hope of scaling to large numbers of users / servers. The notification traffic for anyone with a significant number of "followers" is going to be significant. I think the view that the tent spec authors are taking is a bit too simplistic if this protocol is intended to be Twitter or Facebook-scale.
- wmf 14y agoComputers and the Internet are pretty fast now. I suspect the real difference will not be performance but cost: if you have a million followers you will have to bear the cost of sending out the notifications (as it should be IMO).
- driverdan 14y agoI agree. The problem is this moves from pull to push. Instead of hosting a status update on a server and allowing others to pull from you, which can utilize lots of caching and other optimizations, you're forced to push data to all of your followers on every single update. This adds significantly more overhead. Since the protocol is new it doesn't include any specs for handling push errors. If I push a new status and one of my followers' servers is down what do I do? Do I retry later? Do I continue to try pushing future updates? At what point do I stop trying to send updates to their missing/broken server? If my server goes down how do I handle missed updates? Do I need to query everyone I follow? Can I fetch statues since the last one I received like Twitter? The docs say "There are a number of parameters available to limit the scope of the request" for GET /posts but don't specify the parameters. Error handing is crucial for a decentralized network like this, especially one that pushes to other servers.