3 ms·

Short version: there's no incentive to build or support reliable _infrastructure_ for p2p, so apps won't _design_ around it.

• ownedthx 12y ago
  There is an incentive for real-time audio/video/gaming applications, though: latency. And many such applications do use P2P.
  • drewcrawford 12y ago
    You certainly can. The thing is though that the hops surrounding the server are generally the fastest hops in the whole path. The server is sitting in a big datacenter somewhere with multiply-redundant, professionally-managed network connectivity. Doing a direct shot from client to client would be some faster, but not much. Meanwhile there are usually optimizations that are better you could do in the same amount of time.
    • ownedthx 12y ago
      That's not a valid generalization. Yes, if User A, User B, and the server are in a hub city, such as Dallas, then the difference could be small in either direction. But if user A is in San Francisco, and user B is in San Diego... then routing through the server in Dallas is almost always going to be significantly slower. So if latency is a concern, and you want to route through your server, you need to now cover the network with servers. That's a big deal.
• api 12y ago
  If such an infrastructure did exist, do you think people would use it?