Re: Is a Perfect Storm Forming For Distributed Social Networking?

On Wed, 12 Aug 2009, Story Henry wrote:

> On 12 Aug 2009, at 10:46, Dave Raggett wrote:

>> One of the challenges for distributed social networking is 
>> dealing with sudden hotspots where a huge spike of interest in a 
>> single person causes the server that hosts that person's profile 
>> to falter under the load. This suggests the value for applying 
>> peer to peer techniques to dynamically distributing the load 
>> across many machines. Peer to peer techniques can also help to 
>> sustain performance for search by distributing the processing 
>> across many machines.
>
> Yes, though I think it should be very rare. Cloud computing 
> solutions should be able to deal with such situations quite well. 
> In Social Netoworks I think it is very rare than one person 
> garners so much visibility that a simple server would get 
> overloaded. Easier than changing the protocols for such a 
> situation is to simply upgrade your service contract for a period.

Hmm, the YouTube experience suggests otherwise. An obscure video 
posted by someone previously unknown suddenly catches the attention 
of people all around the World. It may not be practical to upgrade 
your service contract, and just expanding the monthly download limit 
may not solve the problem if the server is overloaded.

Cloud based server's don't solve the problem unless your server is 
virtualized across a large number of machines. A further issue is 
putting all your eggs in one basket, in this case, by relying on a 
cluster of machines owned by a single supplier e.g. Amazon or 
Google as proposed for the "pushbutton web", see [1]

If everyone has to pay for their own server (often bundled as part 
of the ISP fees) we can be independent of any one company. P2P 
technologies have proven their worth, and could be used to couple 
everyone's server into a robust social web with automatic load 
balancing.

[1] http://dashes.com/anil/2009/07/the-pushbutton-web-realtime-becomes-real.html

  Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett

Received on Wednesday, 12 August 2009 10:07:31 UTC