Peer to Peer: Collaboration and Sharing over the Internet

Scalability Barriers

A fundamental problem when deploying any system is the issue of scalability. Something that works well in the small prototype scale might later behave differently, become unstable, or even stop working when fully deployed and taken past a particular size. A subtly different usage pattern than envisioned can also cause unexpected difficulties that relate to local scaling effects.

Understanding both the limits of a design and the reasons for these constraints is important. Examining practical networks illustrates both something of such limits and how the original models can be adapted for better performance. While some of this material could have been presented together with the particular implementation, it would easily have ...