Bittorrenting sims.

Considering currently the quality of life in a sim is inversely proportionate to the amount of people in it, I suggest LL should look at the bittorrent system, and consider implementing some form of it for the server/clients for SL.

Think about it, right now the server sends everyone anything. With one person that's fine, but the more people the more it has to send, the more it slows down, etcetera, until the lag becomes phenomenal.

For those aware of how BT works, I'm suggesting something simple like this:
- Sims are superseeds. They only seed, as they do now.
- Clients are peers. As soon as one client enters a sim, they become a peer, and start downloading from available seeds. If this is the only client, they will have to rely on the server or superseed to send its data. That's the current situation when only 1 client is in a sim.
- If a second client enters the sim where the former client was, the following happens: the first client was a peer but as soon as it's done downloading it becomes a seed. Say that client was me and I set my upload limit to 50kb/s as I'm want to do on actual bit torrents. Now you have TWO seeds, me uploading to the new client at 50kb/s, and saving the server 50kb/s to be sent.
- A third client enters the sim. The second client is now also a seed, or maybe it's still a peer. Either way, again the second client starts uploading to the third client as well as me, and as well as the sim server/superseed.

I'm not sure what the technical issues are with having too many people on a sim but I know one thing people are -very- concerned about is load from rezzing buildings, big textures, etc. All these things can bog a sim's bandwidth down, I know that much, and the torrent system if built in would -greatly- alleviate this problem for higher number of people.

Of course, that leaves the whole problem with excess attachments with scripts bogging the server down if enough people arrive, but at least the bandwidth problem is solved.

What do y'all think?

Bittorrent is good for spreading around static content that doesn't change. It's not good for content that is always changing, because every seed in the chain would have to be updated with the most recent info, and by the time they are all updated, it changes again -- in SL in changes in real time.

Do a seach for "torrent" on here and you'll see its been discussed in the past many times.

How about imagining a situation that actually benefits from this?

I know a couple of City Sims of which 90% never changes.
Imagine how this Sim would run if 90% of its data doesn't need to be sent somuch?

Or better yet, expand the viewer with the option to accept a SimData File.
A big lump of data containing the 90% of Sim data that won't change.
Through a version number the viewer gets informed if the Sim-owner has generated a new SimData file.

Granted, this function would be worthless for Mainland sims where every 512 sq.mtr could be changed by its individual owners.

simdata file yes, p2p no.

Some of us live in Countries with datacaps, its bad enough just using SL, never mind constantly streaming content to others as well.

Sorry, just had to.