Texture Downloads...

It seems to me that rezzing time could be greatly reduced if the SL client could act as an uploading peer in a bittorrent-like network. In this network, the texture will be seeded on the SL server/sim and the clients will proceed to download it from the most responsive peers (aka other SL clients).

Since, generally, all SL clients have a massive texture cache, it's highly likely that you can find peers that have the texture you're looking for, easily. It may even be true that the search for peers be limited to the current sim's connected clients or maybe even allow global texture downloads.

This will, of course, impact the peer client's upload bandwidth, but I don't think that it is being utilized to the same degree as the download pipe. Also, I would think that offloading texture downloading to a different server may be useful in reducing lag.

Anyway, I thought I'd put this out there and see how many shots it takes before it goes down like the Hindenburg.

Sounds reasonable to me. I have always thought that some sort of peer-to-peer networking could be useful for SL. It seems that textures would be the most likely candidate for such a system, too.

I'm sure it is way more complicated than it sounds, especially considering the permission and asset system that is already in place. It's also possible that the additional information needed for the peer-to-peer connections might outweigh the benefits. Still, I think it is a very interesting idea.