Re: [Mldonkey-users] feature suggestion: forward error correction

[Christian Brandt]

On Thu, Sep 05, 2002 at 05:19:06AM +0200, Goswin Brederlow wrote:

> C and D are still online and together they have 4 different chunks:
> 
>    25 D-----C 36   ===>   2356 D------C 2356
> 
> Using FEC both can now restore the original file.

 Ok, this may work out. But you also increase traffic: A FEC which is only able 
to reconstruct one part out of five or 2 out of 15 increases Bandwidth by 
15-20%, make this 2 out of 7 or something like that and you quickly need 40 or 
50% more bandwidth. Those numbers are educated guesses, hamming code & Co have 
faded out of my view after a decade or so.

My 2cent: Bandwidth is too expensive to be wasted this way as incomplete files 
are an rare exception, not the general case. But still its an ugly exception 
;-) Also this would make the Donkeyprotocol too complex for Joe Average to 
understand. Hey, most even do not understand "for 1-3kb/s I get 3-9kB, for 
4-9kb/s I get 12-45kb/s and for 10kb/s I get limitless bandwidth". Most would 
start to think of donkey beeing an user-annoying-tool and not a p2p-software.

-- 
Christian Brandt

 life is short and in most cases it ends with death
 but my tombstone will carry the hiscore