Performance

There is a wide range of performance implications that must be considered when designing P2P applications:

• Broadcast, multicast, or unicast messaging for discovery

• Indexing versus flooding for searches

• Variable-length versus block-oriented data storage and transfer

• Message-passing versus RPC versus other communication patterns

• Bandwidth and scalability constraints

• Fault tolerance and network reliability

• Load balancing and distribution

• Replication and redundancy of information

• Security, public or private keys, encryption

In the next chapter and in the remainder of the book, we will highlight areas in which performance considerations are especially important, and in which a P2P solution might not be the best choice.