3 ms·
There is an incentive for real-time audio/video/gaming applications, though: latency. And many such applications do use P2P.
by 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 agoYou 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 agoThat'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.