P2P Remains Dominant Protocol

An anonymous reader writes "Last week, a press release was issued by Ellacotya that suggested something quite startling — HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, aka Web traffic) had for the first time in four years overtaken P2P traffic. However a new article from Slyck disputes this, and contends that P2P remains the bandwidth heavyweight."

Comments

Protocol?

[dreamchaser]

Here I thought P2P was a class of applications, you know, ones that communicate peer to peer.

WTF. We can't even blame editors for this crap anymore, because they gave us the Firehose.

So true

[vivaoporto]

A lot of P2P applications even uses http in one phase or another of its execution, what is the case of bittorrent clients communication with trackers, that is done over using http requests.

What they might be implying is that the so called "legitimate" traffic (casual WWW surfing) is outpacing filesharing. Ironically, this growing is due the popularization of tools that allow users to share the files via www, tools like Youtube and Flickr (and pornotube, *cough*) that they would share via P2P applications like Kazaa, Napster or IMesh.

Bottom line is: people don't care about the tools, but about the use they do to the tools. Nothing to see here, move along.

If I was designing a P2P network today

[Colin Smith]

It'd be http based. Not for efficiency or any technical reason, but because it's the best camouflage.

2 reasons

[Opportunist]

Youtube (and similar services) and trojans.

Both rely heavily on HTTP for data transfer. But then again, how do you measure that? By port? By header? Who keeps me from running a HTTP server on port 21? Who dictates that I must not wrap a package into a HTTP header so the corporate firewall doesn't get irate?

Generally, I doubt that you can reliably measure it. Especially with P2P services soon implementing a wrapper to fool anti net-neutrality laws and traffic shaping the various ISPs either will implement soon or employ already.

Re:That'll be AJAX

[Ephemeriis]

AJAX actually allows you to, if you want, transfer less data. Gmail, for example, does not need to transmit an entire new page every time I open up a new email message...it just displays the contents of that message. Sure, caches and proxies and all that good stuff can reduce the actual amount of traffic generated by a full-page refresh...but it's still a full-page refresh, you're still requesting a redraw of every single picture and every bit of text - rather than just asking to redraw a small portion.

The reason AJAX is indirectly responsible for an increase in HTTP traffic is because the web is becoming more useful. Gmail and other AJAXy webmail systems are just about as responsive and feature-rich as their traditional desktop counterparts. Message boards and chat systems are becoming more useful and responsive, replacing Usenet and IM clients in places. We've got web-based word processors, spreadsheets, and paint programs. All sorts of stuff is going online now, just because we can. It isn't that AJAX is wasteful, it's that AJAX let's us do so much useful/fun stuff.

Re:When TOR and Freenet unite in p2p...

[graphicsguy]

That seems totally incorrect to me. If anonymizing makes things k times slower with current disk/network speeds, it will still make things k times slower when disks/networks are faster.

Re:That'll be AJAX

[TheRaven64]

Your comment makes me believe that you've never had to think about these issues when designing a real-world application. You've no doubt done zero real-world tests to see what the difference in traffic comes out to (our logs show AJAX saving us considerable bandwidth...we've basically halved our bandwidth per user since AJAXifying our site) We recently investigated moving from an old BBS-style application that users used as a talker (accessed via SSH) to an AJAX web-app. For a single day, the traffic was around 300MB; more than the total SSH (not counting SCP) traffic of the machine for an entire month, with fewer uses on the AJAX version. It was also far more than the XMPP server that runs on the same machine and has an order of magnitude more uses manages to get through.

Of course AJAX is an improvement over reloading the entire page. I don't dispute that at all. The discussion, however, was an AJAX webmail app, versus a local mail app and an IMAP server. If you honestly think that the AJAX app is a better choice here for bandwidth, then I hope I never have to use an app you've designed on a low bandwidth connection.

Hell, you're probably one of those tinfoil-hat-browse-the-web-with-javascript-turned- off types and are just upset that the web is becoming less and less accessible to you

Ah, argumentum ad hominem. A perfect way to make your point. No, I don't browse with JavaScript disabled (although I do turn off plugins most of the time). Yes I have evaluated AJAX apps in real world usage. They do better than a lot of non-AJAX web sites, but as I said, they don't come close to the same efficiency as a local app in a lot of cases. Ty running a web-based IM client and compare that to an XMPP client, for example. Even though XMPP is a fairly bloated protocol to start with, you get a lot less bandwidth used by the local app, for the same functionality.

In some cases, such as a corporate Intranet where bandwidth isn't an issue and ease of maintenance is, an AJAX web-app might be the best choice. Similarly, they make good fall-backs for when you are using someone else's computer. It's all about choosing the right tool for the job. AJAX is not the right tool for every job, and there seems to be a growing belief that it is.