[Tilesathome] Distributed server idea

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

> each machine holds a cache of things.
> when a machine starts up, it holds nothing in cache.
> the machine knows of the address of the master index machine.
> when the machine has something in it's bowels, it just serves it.
> when the thing is not in this machine's cache, it requests the index
> with the locations of the things. then it goes ask one of the other
> machines that have the thing to give it to it, and stores the thing in
> its local cache.
> it shouldn't be too hard to implement

I guess it shouldn't. But then whenever the machine cannot serve  
something, *two* network requests are required. Which is fine if  
you're talking LAN but as I understood we're talking distribution  
over the Internet. And since we''re highly dynamic, anything older  
than an hour (max!) would have to be considered out of date...

It really depends on what kind of use you have in mind. The DNS  
concept works well if you have a very distributed environment, where  
the individual "micro servers" do not need to have high bandwidth or  
a lot of hard disk space available - they can just serve one single  
tileset if they want, and there may be thousands of them.

A caching mechanism like the one you're proposing works well if you  
have a small number of large, high-performance proxy/cache systems  
hit by all clients, ideally all in one place.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00.09' E008°23.33'