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Is The Internet Growing Too Fast?
SpunOne writes: "According to this article, the Internet is growing faster than today's routers can handle. After years of predictable growth, the size of the routing table and traffic in it exploded during the past six months, topping 104,000 entries in March, compared with 75,000 a year ago. Even more troubling is evidence that frequent updates to the routing table entries by network managers are causing instability in the Internet's backbone routing infrastructure."
Like hell. If my (very large) ISP didn't occasionally wipe out our mission-critical connection for an hour or so, maybe I wouldn't care about multihoming. I'm not multihomed yet for budget reasons, unfortunately, but once we can afford to go that route we damn well will.
I did propose to the IPv6 group that two things in the new IP space be done. First, that a bit toggle whether this is a roaming/DHCP IP address (an opt-out system, plus additional space to indicate if you were even on earth, or in orbit, etc.), and the second, including a rough latitude and longitude for the system with the IP. It was never necessary nor possible to get an exact location for every device. Besides, everything in a rack would have the same IP.
When a pitched it then, it was quickly shot down. However, it allowed for regional routing, which is where you just sent packets to the router responsible for a major lat/lon, which then forwarded packets to things in its area. Really simple.
It also allowed you to figure out where things were coming from (if the user opted in), which meant you could redirect them to a regional mirror. As a side-effect, folks like Yahoo could actually keep all the French out of websites, since the IP would actually have some sort of location information in it.
Routing would be more efficient, and smaller, and faster. But hey, I'm just a nutcase, as the IPv6 guys said.
the fact here is that a multihomed router taking full BGP routes from their upstreams today needs atleast 256 megs of RAM and a big cpu (example cisco 7500 MINUMUM) in order to handle it..
The problem is all the recent "hey let's be a DSL provider!!" idiots that have no understanding of route summarization and addressing.. Thankfully many of these ISPs are going bankrupt now so hopefully all their /23's and /24's will be withdrawn after their lights go out.
The ISPs need GOOD engineers who can design a network in a manner that only the most aggregate route will be announced to external peers.. the biggest problem is they assign smaller blocks and then that customer gets multihomed and the original provider has to cut holes in their BGP filters in order for it to work right.
If you're going to multihome, GET YOUR OWN ADDRESSES FROM ARIN!!! Places like Verio have very Nazi-ish filtering policies and their routing tables only hit about 85,000.. While verio makes bad routing decisions, this shows an example of what the internet routing table SHOULD look like.
SUMMARIZE, SUMMARIZE, FUCK YOUR TOASTER, IT DOESN'T NEED AN IP ADDRESS!@@!#@!#
Well, isn't that what those people get paid to do?
-A.P.
--
* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
You're absolutely right that our ability to cope with the net is what's suffering. A friend of mine once said that the Internet is "like giving +1 to everyone's intelligence. If they don't know something, they now have a tool that lets them look it up and get a ton of information quickly." But now we realize that you only get the +1 bonus if you are already fairly intelligent, because it takes intelligence to be able to do Internet research, more intelligence to determine if the sites that you're looking at are good sites and/or responsible with facts.
With the wisdom of hundreds of other netters, and the net's gift of great communication, I can be more intelligent than a doctor is about a given prescription drug, for example. But if I don't select sources correctly, I can be downright dangerously ignorant about that drug.
If the tools that we have for research improve, THEN we can add +1 to everyone's intelligence. So what we have in the meantime is a tool where the smart get smarter and the dumb stay pretty much where they are.
It may be that the current economic contraction may be just what the net needs. It may stagnate in growth for a little bit -- and then we'll have a little bit of time to catch our collective breaths and allow humans to catch up with what is possible. One reason we have all these fucked companies is that the masses didn't adapt as quickly as the netted elite. The main reason is the temporarily insane marketplace, sure, but a lot of online things are much better than their offline counterparts, it's just that people couldn't catch up with the growth of the net. It's better to meet online than to travel 2000 miles to meet, but today we are still adapting to the idea that we can shop for airline tickets over the net.
The net has allowed us to see what's possible and to implement new and better approaches. But it could not hold our hand and show us the new and better approaches. With time at a premium in everyone's lives, no-one can afford the time for experimentation or learning with these new approaches.
OK, I'll stop now before I become Katz.
The result - the Internet's population CAN exceed its useful capacity. (It has, several times. I've experienced outages on international links of up to 14 days, due to catastrophic hardware overload.)
The problem is that the AVERAGE load needs to be less than 1/3 the total capacity, if you want to avoid major packet loss. However, when you look at profit-run businesses, it makes no sense to have three times the capacity you can get away with. That's just going to eat profits.
The major failure of a profit-driven IP-based network is that you hit maximum profits when you hit minimum quality of service. There's no way round that.
In the end, privatizing the Internet may turn out to be a failure. Upgrades are expensive, and the increase in revenue will typically be trivial, in comparison, making maintenance unprofitable and (in a depressed tech market) marketplace suicide. (You think shareholders'll approve a plan to "throw away money"? No matter how necessary it might be, from a quality standpoint?)
In the end, enough people just use the net for music, prawn and e-mail (none of which require speed) that the Internet could, in principle, survive off just those services.
This is why projects such as Internet 2 became popular. Researchers and Universities around the world realised that the Internet is dead for any "real" (read: "Network-Intensive") work.
The now-famous live videoconference between American and Russian hospitals, over the MBone, would not be possible today. (It was barely possible, then, with networks around the globe suffering melt-downs from the incredible demands it placed on the system.)
Today, even connecting to the MBone is a nightmare. Mail the MBone mailing list, and they'll tell you to pay over hard cash or talk your ISP into doing so. Gone are the days of trading resources, knowledge and capabilities.
The Internet will live on, but we'll see further fragmentation, as commercialization forces people to build specialized, distinct networks, which will become ever-more incompatiable.
If this is the world "we" (as the users and therefore the funding) want, then oh well. It sounds b awful, to me. But this has gone far beyond anything any individual can change. I'm not even sure it's something even large corporations can change. (Microsoft tried! And is still trying!) This may well be the scenario we're locked into, no matter what.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
This is the single funniest statement I've read in days.
"The sky is not falling, but the sky is hanging a little low."
Why is that quote funny to me?
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
They blame multihoming - however there is a limit of 65535 possible autonomous systems out there under BGP4, so if each of these has an average of 3 entries, doesn't that give a max number of route entries of under 200,000? Except you also have to multiply by the number of IP address ranges (networks and subnets) advertised by each AS - but still there would seem to be a limit not too far from where we are now. Which probably does mean it's time to replace BGP...
Energy: time to change the picture.
I think your opinion comes off as a little crass.
The major reason birthrates are disproportionate with family income is because of a lack of education and access to information. That is the primary benefit of the internet - access to information, something people in socially and economically deprived countries desperately need! When a government is too negligent to supply basic infrastures and social services to it's citizens, the people have to impower themselves. Communication via the internet would allow people to assemble, exchange ideas and find solutions for their particular situations.
"...teach a man to fish" is all I'm saying Rich. Enable people to find their own solutions.
Unfortunately, there is no financial incentive for multinational corporations or wealthy countries like United States and Canada to help developing countries participate in the information age. And redundant (and just plain stupid) topics like "Is the internet growing too fast" is a bloody waste of time when all this focused brainpower - using the internet *ahem* - could be used to tackle serious global issues.
[ soapbox | off ]
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
Hi. John Galt is a moron, is your answer. Who else would want to have anything to do with that railroad bitch? ;)
Good post, thanks. Just wanted to add - The city of Sacramento actually used to own a nuclear plant (called SMUD) but they closed it down about 11 years ago. Certain groups (including myself) warned at the time that it was an irresponsible action based on unscientific feel-good eco-politics and could eventually cause brownouts and power shortages. So you have to understand that this California Stupidity thing has been going on for over a decade now.
I live in Dallas today, thank God. It's comforting to live in a state that never voted for Bill Clinton, even once, for anything. And a state that can take care of its own power grid, thank you very much.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
The issue is not whether the pipes are saturated, the issue is whether the routers can propagate and crunch routing information fast enough. Spam is irrelevant; the size and complexity of the Internet is.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
Looking forward to hearing your developments!
Seriously, there was somone a year or two ago who made a vast leap in voice recognition by realizing that you need to vary the timing between firings. Now I haven't heard of any practical developments, patents, licenses, or products as a result, so it may have been bullshit, but... Given that so many years of neural net research apparently overlooked this simple variation of technique, and given that any application of this to routing technology would necessarily make use of asynchronous signals, someone like myself who has no real knowledge about neural nets at all can see that it's likely that a big chunk of the theoretical groundwork for such an application is still terra incognita. Which means that we could easily be looking at 5 years research time PLUS design, development, implementation, and deployment of an utterly new routing protocol, one which would have to speak natively to at least BGP, if not other routing protocls, and which could have mission-critical implications for every major backbone provider.
Good luck!
P.S. Don't forget to post those links when you find them!
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
Is it because somebody wants 69.69.69.69 to be on one end of the Continent and 69.69.69.99 to be on the other? Why? I'd be sorely tempted to screw'em. Drop 69.69.69.99's packets on the floor if it's away from the rest of it's C class.
IP addr's aren't sacred. They should be chosen for the convenience of the routers -- that's the idea behind Class A, B & C arrd blocks. If AOL wants to use a US IP addr for *.de traffic, fine, just drop the packet in the US and let'em route it themselves.
When a system is taxed, somebody will suffer. It shouldn't be those who follow the rules. Otherwise, nobody will follow the rules and it will get much worse.
...after a few more years, the novelty of the 'net will fade, and it will become a standard part of our lives. People won't see the need to have their own website anymore, unless they really are trying to share something with the world that is worthwhile.
:-)
No offense, but bullshit. Did the novelty of the Polaroid fade? Are the only people who have an interest in photography these days folks like Ansel and Maplethorpe? No! Now we have disposable cameras and sticky film.
Personal pages will be around as long as somebody's giving away free hosting in exchange for ad banners... Now if you want to debate the certain death of the ad banner, that's different.
"Smear'd with gumms of glutenous heat, I touch..." - Comus, John Milton
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
This was posted on NANOG this morning and should be required reading. It is from Sean Doran who basically built Sprint's Network in the early/mid 90s and is probably *the* authority on this kind of stuff. Read it.
The problem is with the routing tables being filled. Therefore, if you want to use the oh-so-lame "OSI Model", the problem is layer 3, while what you're talking about, HTTP, is layer 7.
-bugg
OK reality check here -- how does email traffic have ANYTHING to do with the size of routing tables? (Hint: It doesn't have anything to do with it). This article isn't talking about traffic its talking about the size of hte routing tables.
And what commision is it that is planning to "delete spammers from the internet"? I hope they don't delete me.
Troll...........
I see everyone blaming the small multihomed sites and talk about banning multihoming on this forum, I strongly disagree with that and I strongly disatree this nasty quote from the article:
"Half of the companies that are multihomed should have gotten better service from their providers," says Patrik Faltstrom, a Cisco engineer and co-chair of the IETF's Applications Area. "ISPs haven't done a good enough job explaining to their customers that they don't need to multihome."
Yeah sure, my provider told me how I didn't need to multi-home and I got burned. Excuse me for stamping on your elitism here, but everybody wants redundancy and you shouldn't have to be a fortune 500 to get it.
About a year and a half ago our company was looking into upgrading bandwidth, and since we already had a t1 my boss figured we could buy another t1 one from a different company than our normal bandwidth provider, thus achieving increased speed redundancy with a different isp at the same time.
Well I found out that in order to do something like that I needed to run BGP to get myself into the core routers routing table because I would have multiple paths to my network. I was a big concerned about this because it sounded drastic to me and I spoke with my tech rep at my current provider and we mutually agreed that perhaps it wasn't the best thing to do as we could get redundnacy from their network and I wouldn't need to have my own AS.
Well, to make a long story not quite as long, I got burned. They had some routing problems that affected both of my links at once, and we were down for a bit. I had to explain to the boss why I had made the decision I did and he wasn't real happy about it. I am about to be installing our 3rd t1 and switching to bgp so we can be multihomed.
This is a very typical story, and is the primary reason that the BGP4 tables are so huge. Every dotcom and their mom has been going through a similar scenario the past year or so. Now of course this is starting to not work very well so we are seeing some problems, and these same dotcoms are being blamed for this.
The problem isn't the dotcom's, its due to limitations in the current system. I suppose they (we) do shoulder some of the blame, but christ shouldn't we be allowed to have some kind redundancy? What is there some kind of special "VIP's only" sign in front of the redundancy bar? To hell with that. Obvously the current situation cannot continue, but I'll tell you right now that all of these dotcom's (and their moms) are not going to be giving up redundancy, so you core router guys better figure out why to let everyone in on the redundancy bandwagon.
Sigs are awesome huh?
Meanwhile, places like Extreme offer more GigE ports than you could ever imagine using and at a much more reasonable price. Cisco has a stronghold on the market indeed.
I've worked with Extreme's switches. They're good. Simple, WICKED fast, and more cost-effective than Cisco.
My only beef is that if you want to use them as core routers, you've got to be running Ethernet. No ATM interfaces. No T1 interfaces, no DS3 intercaces, no OC3/12/96 interfaces. So you've still got to hang other vendors' boxes off the mess and you risk vendors fingerpointing when something chokes.
It's kind of a catch-22. Cisco's mature, but almost too much so, which all sorts of useless legacy equipment in their product line that they have to support and legacy code in the IOS kernel. Extreme needs to become more mature, I kind of feel their software needs some fleshing out yet and they need to add some components to their product line.
I love that crazy fast backplane on the BlackDiamonds, but for chrissake can't we do something about the purple and green color scheme?
-carl
. We've got computers, we're tapping phone lines, you know that ain't allowed - Talking Heads, "Life During Wartime"
Actually, I'm pretty sure that Cisco's 2500-series routers to have m68k processors. 68030, I believe. Everything never has a PowerPC variant. Dunno about Juniper, but I'm going to guess they're running a RISC processor of some sort.
The hardware issue was another factor covered by NANOG this morning in response to this article. The long and the short of is that throwing hardware at a problem might get you through the day, but good planning and forethought will bring you through a lot more cleanly.
With any router manufacturer, your value-added is never the hardware but rather the software (i.e. Cisco's IOS) and the service. Sure, you could grab a PII and run GNU Zebra for your BGP peering, but the CCO is a great resource to have when troubleshooting. Puts MS's TechNotes system to shame. It WORKS. Plus, working in downtown Chicago I know that if my 7200 takes a dive, Cisco's got a parts depot blocks away where I can get parts.
-carl. We've got computers, we're tapping phone lines, you know that ain't allowed - Talking Heads, "Life During Wartime"
As one of the replies to your post pointed out, a lot of these jillion pages (the vast majority of homepages, anyway) are crap. Personal crap. Yes, they're sitting on a web that's supposed to be interconnected, but for these personal pages there's no need - they exist simply so their owners can tell a friend or relative, "hey, go check it out, it's got my dog's picture on it."
This majority of personal pages should be ignored by search engines simply because there is nothing to search for in them - typing "Cindy" into google when looking for your cousin's homepage wouldn't be much use no matter how many times google's been to her site.
---
We're thrilled to see your enthusiasm, and we look forward to the results of your research and work in this field to help this endeavor get off the ground. Godspeed, sir.
---
Well, I certainly don't think that NNTP is putting a strain on any routers...
Got Rhinos?
Second of all, a greater concern might be "Is the Internet growing too disorganized?" There are ten jillion pages out there, and the vast majority of them aren't even linked to from other documents. They don't show up on search engines, they just sit there, with the web masters wondering why they've only gotten 3 visits in the past year.
Even the sites that can be found by search engines are getting increasingly hard to organize. Yahoo! is starting to wobble in their traditional high-quality, hand-picked links directory. They can't keep up with the net, so they've started implementing pay-for-listing programs. The Open Directory Project survives because of heaps and heaps of volunteer editors, but every category varies in qualities, and some basic categories don't even have editors. Many other search engines have attempted dynamically-created directories based on keywords, but these are easy to spam and often have very low-quality content.
All the disorganization also affects our information processing skills. We don't read like we used to. Hardcore web surfers are generally incapable of sitting down and enjoying a good book, because they're too accustomed to the "This page doesn't have it, go to the next one" cognitive paradigm.
What we really need is a new way to organize web sites, perhaps based on a combination of client (most visited sites), server (author-specified categories), and parsed (most linked-to sites) information.
The internet is not growing too fast. Our ability to cope with it, however, is failing to grow with it.
Got Rhinos?
Acording to the aticle the problem isn't with the amount of user traffic on the internet, it is with the amount of router-to-router traffic. The routing tables are being updated too quickly for the routers to handle and pass the changes onto other routers. As the number or routing entries an updates grow, because of multi-homed systems, the system can't keep up with the changes. At least thats the impression I got from the article, please tell me if i'm wrong.\ =\=\=\=\
=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=
The same is true of telephone numbers. Originally, the area code addressed an area, the exchange prefix addressed a specific switch, and switches didn't need much routing info. Today, two adjacent phones can have completely different area codes and exchange prefixes, and most phone calls involve a database lookup to get routing info for the call. The internal architecture of the phone system has changed completely in the last twenty years to make this possible.
The Internet is going through the same transition. The endpoint is probably IPv6, totally non-locative addresses, a lookup for every routing decision, and a hierarchical cache of a distrbiuted database system for the routing info, somewhat like DNS. But we're not there yet. The existing technology was designed for a network with a hierachical address structure, so that the routers only needed to track class A, B and C networks. Now they're expected to track more finely divided portions of the IP address space, requiring more router info. BGP is hard-pressed to keep up.
I looked at this problem once in the 1980s, and concluded that part of the solution was a strong separation between information about actual topology (what nodes and links actually exist) and network status (which nodes and links are up). The former changes more slowly than the latter, and contains more data. The link state info changes more rapidly, but the data volume per link is small. Such a separation helps you get a handle on the data volume.
It also makes the network more robust, because you can afford to do more checking on topology data. You'd like to verify that both ends of a link agree on a link before putting it into the topology, for example. That is, before anybody accepts a link between A and B, they need to see A saying it has a link to B and B saying it has a link to A, preferably with digital signatures. I was trying to devise a routing protocol for DoD that would resist attacks on the network in the form of bad routing data. But we didn't get the contract to build that, so I went on to other things. Whomever gets stuck with replacing BGP needs to solve that problem.
But I did this before mobile IP was an issue, and never had to deal with that very difficult problem.
Ignore this shit. Every year, someone predicts the internet will "collapse under its own weight". Guess what? It NEVER DOES. People have been claiming the sky is falling since NSFnet became available to the public -- I'm still waiting.
I think you misspelled "Feel free to sit back on your lazy ass while somebody else designs and implements a fix - just like they always do". HTH. HAND.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
There is also some very interesting information regarding IPv6 in various sites, such as 6BONE's, and Sun's. It is really great to poke around with IPv6 stuff, there are a lot of programs that support it by now, such as lynx (-dev tree only), w3m, BitchX, epic, etc. etc. etc. And also, IPv6 is cool because it lets you create such educational hosts like dead:beef:c0ff:eeca:bf00:3:133:7.
If you don't believe me, here is my sit1 interface:
You're tired of Slashdot ads? Get junkbuster now!
"
Utilities such as: Gas, Electric, Water, Internet Access, should be GOVERNMENT regulated and provided. "
"
YES!! more socialism! while we're at it cars, computers, televisions, steak tar tar and beer should also be provided by the government.
"
I think the argument is infrastructure should be built and maintained by the government, otherwise you'd need multiple gas supplies to your house for competition. The idea is only one set of power lines needs to be built to your house, rather than one per electricity company.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
This Slashdot story reminds me of the restaurants nobody goes to because they are too crowded.
Yeap, seen this too many times to be funny: Network managers, when you make a change to the networks you advertise or your filters, use "clear ip bgp * soft out"! Without the soft out, all your routes get withdrawn and then re-added around a minute later, crating a mini route wave through the Internet. Instead of forcefully resetting your peers, soft out will just add to the table version without withdrawing routes. You could also use "soft in" for applying filters to incoming routes also BUT watch out for memory useage with this command. Soft out doesn't have this issue.
This is fairly basic Cisco IOS stuff but I've seen network admins from 2 of the top ISPs do this on peering point routers that were advertising a lot of routes to a lot of peers.
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a brutal anal raping at airport security
- Replace HD with flash disk
- Under-clock processor to where only heatsink is needed
Not too hard, eh? And now you have the same thing as a Cisco, just a case fan or two moving. For those really worried, redundant power supplies are nice too.I can't be karma whoring - I've already hit 50!
SIG: HUP
Then /. would have to switch off the lameness filter once and for all.
To avoid a complete meltdown of the Internet, President G.W. Bush has recommended that rolling blankouts begin within the next two months. During peak periods of Internet traffic, up to 100,000 sites may have their routing tables blanked for up to an hour in order to reduce the load on the system.
"I may not know much about the Internet, but I don't think you need a PhD to see what all this free music trading is doing to our nation supply of routing tables," Bush was quoted as saying. Asked if he was implying that Napster was responsible for the rolling blankouts, he replied "The RIAA says they are, so it must be true."
feel better now?
"DeRegulation and Commercialization of basic utilities was the dumbest idea ever invented.
"Okay what did it help? Not a blithering thing, okay so some jackass in idaho saved $2.95 on his gas bill, which of course is more important then the 14 BILLION dollar debt the California utilities are suffering. "
No, the dumbest idea ever was calling the removal wholesale cost restrictions and keeping consumer charges fixed, deregulation. Lets open the backend to market fluctation and not allow the front end to respond. hmmm that's smart.
By the way, that was Cali's deregulation and had nothing to do with Idaho, Washington, Arizona, Colorado or any other state. If you'r going to deregulate, do it right an open the whole thing to the market.
"De-Regulation was an idea pushed through by greedy assholes trying to convince you it was a good idea while they were planning to run with the profits even more then when they abused the government contracts. "
Uhh huh... Price fixing is a great way to promote greed. Let's charge the customer less then it costs us to provide a power and make a HUGE profit. Then we'll be Billions of dollars of debt and richer the Bill Gates.
"Utilities such as: Gas, Electric, Water, Internet Access, should be GOVERNMENT regulated and provided. "
YES!! more socialism! while we're at it cars, computers, televisions, steak tar tar and beer should also be provided by the government.
"Oh no not that evil government???? I'm sorry but some shit has to be done by the big guys, because they're the only ones not trying to make a buck in fact they loose money constantly."
Ha they don't need to make money, they just spend it and take more from you. So lets give this stuff to people for whom cost is no major impedment, and they still buy form the lowest bidder. Making a buck can be a good thing. It means you provided a good or service for less then people were willing to pay for it.
"Nobody in Cali is building a new Nuclear Plant or Spending billions on alternative energy resources research. "
Damn Right! and that's the problem. If they want the power they've got to generate it somehow. If They don't want a nuclear plant in thier backyard, maybe they can pay the folks in Idaho a few billion dollars to have it in their's. I'm sure the guy in Idaho wouldn't mind getting free power and a check every month from the residents of Cali for that reactor a few miles from his house. OF course maybe Sacremento will realize they can get in on some of that cash down in silicon valley if they are willing to build a reactor or two an d charge a market rate to the folks in the Bay Area.
"Think about shit before you blindly go saying ..."
No comment... :)
"Also why can't we get Clinton back? I don't care who sucks his dick just that he doesn't f up my economy like bush or gore will)"
Well a constitutional Amendment for one thing. Durring who's adminstration did this start? So we see his results, but we'll make Bush or Gore guilty even before they can commit the crime, good.
This reminds me of something I read once...
Who is John Galt?
Well, one thing's for certain. There will be no stopping growth until every home can simultaneously stream in four separate, HDTV-quality porno streams.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
According to this post it's not growing fast enough...
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
Google, on the other hand, encourages success from sites that are good, rather than sites that are well-financed. Being well-financed will always help, but Google ultimately places the most weight on sites that get referenced frequently, instead of sites that can afford to take out a $600 yellow page ad. That is the sort of new innovation in web organization that I think will have a big impact on how we find information in the future.
-Keslin, the naked nerd girl
-Keslin, the naked nerd girl
Oh great... back to ascii porn
My personal opinion on this problem, is the control that the content providers have on this system is too much. Freenet seems to solve this by getting your data from the nearest source, just like mirrors are supposed to. If every home dial-up user contributes to the serving of files, then the problem is reduced. Obviously the encryption in Freenet slows it down, and this should be removed, a publisher should have to submit the content to this system, but would benefit us all if they do. For example i live in the UK, and im sure many other /. readers do. It would be so much less burden on the transatlantic links, and all the routers between me and /. if i could get the info from whoever has just read it in my town, or even street. You could solve all the bandwidth problems by sharing it out.
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Yes, the people that are paid to engineer the Internet will solve the technical issue, and as always the gloomy predictions ala Metcalfe, will probably be proved wrong.
Remember when the backbones were 56 Kbps (before 1988) and it was unthinkable to some people it won't collapse? Remember the T1 backbones until 1991, when Internet was doomed to be charged by volume?
Nowadays I have 1-5 Mbps download connection to major sites. Bandwidth is no longer a big issue? Now predictions are about explosions/wild changes of route tables (to be fair, this has been started a long time ago, along with with IPv4 unconceivably too small address space).
I'm not a router expert, but...
Routing uses the process of receiving a packet and checking its destination. Using a table lookup based on the destination, it finds the the neighboring router it should forward the packet to. The table is updated so that routing can find 'the shortest path.' The real question here is how 'shortest' or distance is defined.
Your method of configuring geographic location on routers is basically trying to get the router to calculate its distance to its neighbors. However, you're thinking about geographic distance rather than logical topology which is the 'road map' that routers can travel on. There are two direct problems that stem from your method:
1. Pipe size (bandwidth) is not accounted for. If there exists two paths to the destination, should I take the 'geographically' shorter path that is connected by a 56K line, or a slightly longer path that consists of several OC3's?
2. Hop count is not weighed. With two paths, the geographically shorter path may travel through 20 routers, where a longer path may hop through 5 routers--how do you determine the tradeoffs?
Most importantly, routers currently have a mechanism to address this routing issue by allowing users to define the distance between routers. I believe this is usually set to reflect bandwidth size (ie. usually people define their OC3's to be shorter than their T1's). This is generally easier for network managers to adjust their link distances than to tweak their lat/lon coordinates.
Most of the problems with congestion I've seen is due to capacity problems--where there may be two different paths to a destination, but one path is over-utilized and another is under-utilized. Currently, routers are very limited in their load-balancing techniques. I believe Cisco routers can balance up to 6 equal paths--but configuring multiple 'equal' paths is not easy for a meshed network (equal as in defined distance). Without equal paths, routers generally send their packets down the 'shortest' path, regardless of congestion. Routers are not intelligent enough to recognize congestion and calculate the 'next shortest path' (though 'next-shortest' paths are done when there is a link failure). Without this type of mechanism, if you were to get the router to use the 'path of least resistence,' it would just shift the congestion from the previous route to your newly defined route. Currently, the MPLS initiative is trying to address this capacity issue.