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One of the coolest implementations of WebRTC is a project my friend launched called PeerCDN (https://peercdn.com/ https://peercdn.com/) - basically allows you t

One of the coolest implementations of WebRTC is a project my friend launched called PeerCDN (https://peercdn.com/ https://peercdn.com/) - basically allows you to reduce bandwidth costs by leveraging the resources of active users on your app.

christiangenco 14y ago
Holy cow - this is amazing! My girlfriend brought up a good point: is there any way to opt-out of seeding?
- aviswanathan 14y ago
  Hmm not sure... Haven't actually tried it out yet
ericz 14y ago
Here's one my friends (and I) are building, including a live demo: http://demo.peerkit.com/static/index_demo.html http://demo.peerkit.com/static/index_demo.html
malandrew 14y ago
I remember looking into the feasability of something like this about 3-4 years ago when I was working on a social game with ~10 million DAU. Our bandwidth costs for static files were really really high even with a big discount from S3 because we were a heavy user. It's awesome to see that it is finally a reality. With things like this, getting exposure isn't a matter of having the money to host your content, but simply a matter of being popular. The more popular you are, the more likely that you can offload static file hosting to those consuming your content.
film42 14y ago
As soon as I saw the WebRTC demo I went looking through the bittorrent spec to see how that was done, to then see how I could do something similar. Looks like you beat me to it, but it's a powerful tool nonetheless. Just imagine Reddit only hosting their database and a single server for master replication.
fyi80 14y ago
This was a pillar of Kazaa's business model and made everyone angry that Kazaa's darknet was sucking up their bandwidth, so be sold by Kazaa.
jodrellblank 14y ago
Allows active users of your app to spy on each other, seeing who connects and when. Or maybe DOS your site, by pretending to be a PeerCDN participant but instead sending large chunks rate limited to 0.5Kb/s. The SHA1 hash check will stop them being used, but only after a long delay. People could be having a bad experience and you wouldn't even know by watching server stats. How is the connection between peers encrypted?
- shitlord 14y ago
  The problem of bad peers exists with BitTorrent as well, but it's not very effective unless you have a lot of IPs to spare. I found https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=4343462&tag=1 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=434346... to be an interesting read.

christiangenco 14y ago

Holy cow - this is amazing! My girlfriend brought up a good point: is there any way to opt-out of seeding?

aviswanathan 14y ago
Hmm not sure... Haven't actually tried it out yet

ericz 14y ago

Here's one my friends (and I) are building, including a live demo: http://demo.peerkit.com/static/index_demo.html http://demo.peerkit.com/static/index_demo.html

malandrew 14y ago

I remember looking into the feasability of something like this about 3-4 years ago when I was working on a social game with ~10 million DAU. Our bandwidth costs for static files were really really high even with a big discount from S3 because we were a heavy user. It's awesome to see that it is finally a reality. With things like this, getting exposure isn't a matter of having the money to host your content, but simply a matter of being popular. The more popular you are, the more likely that you can offload static file hosting to those consuming your content.

film42 14y ago

As soon as I saw the WebRTC demo I went looking through the bittorrent spec to see how that was done, to then see how I could do something similar. Looks like you beat me to it, but it's a powerful tool nonetheless. Just imagine Reddit only hosting their database and a single server for master replication.

fyi80 14y ago

This was a pillar of Kazaa's business model and made everyone angry that Kazaa's darknet was sucking up their bandwidth, so be sold by Kazaa.

jodrellblank 14y ago

Allows active users of your app to spy on each other, seeing who connects and when. Or maybe DOS your site, by pretending to be a PeerCDN participant but instead sending large chunks rate limited to 0.5Kb/s. The SHA1 hash check will stop them being used, but only after a long delay. People could be having a bad experience and you wouldn't even know by watching server stats. How is the connection between peers encrypted?

shitlord 14y ago
The problem of bad peers exists with BitTorrent as well, but it's not very effective unless you have a lot of IPs to spare. I found https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=4343462&tag=1 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=434346... to be an interesting read.