Subject: [P2Prg] Re: [p2p-hackers] P2P vs traditional client-server model

From: Arnaud Legout <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 14:55:53 +0200

Hi,

your question is representative of the widespread belief there is about
P2P.
Until recently all researches/products/interest were on P2P localization.
P2P localization is fun, a nice problem to work on, and it may have many
applications, but
you can always do better with a client server model (as you pointed out
with the google example).

Juuso is right that google is rich and has a great infrastructure, but I
do not believe that any P2P solution would be able to
provide even 1/100 of the service provided by google web indexing (in
terms of accuracy, responsiveness, indexation, etc.)
Then if you scale down to something that P2P can handle, you have an
affordable equivalent in the client server model.

If you take apart legal issues and censorship and do not see strong
arguments in favor of P2P localization.

However, P2P is not only about localization.
If you consider P2P file replication, then you have a service that no
other infrastructure can offer
at a reasonable cost (unless you have multicast, but probably we will
never see multicast to the end-user widely deployed).
The future of P2P comes from is ability to provide a huge capacity of
service without any dedicated infrastructure.

Regards,
Arnaud.

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From: Ivica Rimac <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Oct 2006 10:43:02 -0400

Hi,

there is a very good point Arnaud mentioned: cost-efficiency.
As long as one *scales* the investment into the service infrastructure,
the client/server approach probably performs better than P2P. However,
not every service provider will have the same business model and
monetary back up Google has from ad selling. Hence, cost-efficiency is
crucial and "overprovisioning" might not yield to this goal. As an
example, analyst estimated that YouTube "burned" $1M per month mainly
for the data pipe -- they solved this problem by getting bought by
Google ;-)

With regard to superiority of client/server-based localization services,
at a first glance the study of the DNS system in [1] gives a supportive
example for this statement. It indicates that the DNS has the
performance edge over DHT schemes, however, mainly because of caching
naming hierarchies. This works very well for the quasi-static (compared
to the TTLs) Internet topology. But how would it behave in a very
dynamic environment (e.g. ad hoc networks) where caching entries would
have to time out very soon/immediately in order to keep the name
resolution system up-to-date?

My two cents,
Ivica

[1]  V. Pappas, D. Massey, A. Terzis, and L. Zhang. A Comparative Study
of Current DNS with DHT-Based Alternatives", in Proc. of IEEE INFOCOM 2006.

-- 
  Ivica Rimac                   Bell Labs / Lucent Technologies
  Email: [email-masked]          101 Crawfords Corner Road
  Phone: +1-732-949-8785                 Holmdel, NJ 07733, USA
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