Practical Considerations

It’s easy to become beguiled by the promise and potential of the feature sets that p2p implementations claim, especially when looking at the promotional claims coming from both the free and commercial camps in the field.

While a peer technology can be ideal for some applications of information access, it will assuredly fail miserably in others. The first requirement of any intelligent choice is at least being able to identify the general areas where a particular application might be spectacularly inappropriate.

Take for example a simple file-sharing system with files individually managed at every node. Files are probably duplicated across many nodes, which is fine for content that is unchanging. Random duplication can ...

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