On Tue, Aug 07, 2001 at 09:27:42AM +0000, Steve Mynott wrote:
Adam Back <adam@cypherspace.org> writes:
If any were looking for a replacement for napster since it buckled to pressure from RIAA, it's here: morpheus.
Are you sure this isn't just the first flush of enthusiasm which will fade in the cold light of morning?
Isn't it just yet another closed source P2P network like Direct Connection?
It is closed source and closed protocol. The closed source issue is a minor problem, someone will reverse engineer and re-write it, or design a new incrementally better file sharing protocol. The reason for enthousiasm is the demonstration of feasibility of a number of open questions in scalability and performance which arise after observing gnutella. The fact that morpheus has reached the level of scalability it has, speed of searches, and download speed is interesting because it gives a lower bound on what's possible. That it is possible is good news for the future of file sharing.
Gnutella wasn't but didn't scale, morpheus appears to be scaling and if anything performance is improving as the data density gets higher so the sharing surface can give you the content you want from closer and closer nodes. There may be an inflection point where it starts to really take off as the number of users is still improving the usability, performance and variety of content.
Why don't you think Gnutella doesn't scale?
Empirical evidence gathered by trying to use it over a number of months. It starts slower, searches are slower, and downloads fail a lot (~90%) of the time, resumes don't work as well, resumes can't switch source, it doesn't download from multiple sites simultaneously, plus morphus has a number of really good client GUI features which positively affect the richness of meta-information available for searches.
<http://www.openp2p.com/lpt/a//p2p/2001/01/25/truelove0101.html>
While some of the excuses given here are undoubtedly valid, the primary problem -- broadcast searches -- is not addressed except by a not widely used and manually configured fast host acting as a proxy shielding a slow host from search requests (if I interpret that right). Morpheus on the otherhand automates it's solution to the general issue of different host speeds and scalability of searches -- self organising selection of super-nodes -- and does many many other things better than gnutella, and discards it's speculated intra-version compatibility issue effect on performance by virtue of there currently being only one version (or more properly the versions all rely on the same comms layer library). Adam