137635 - P2P Caching Suggestion

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Networking, enhancement)

Description

[Jaap Vermeulen]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; Q312461; .NET 
CLR 1.0.3705)
BuildID:    2002041503

Every time you visit a website you store it in your cache. Imagine if other 
people were able to download that information from you, and you from other 
people. This would solve the slashdot effect which haunts the web so often 
these days. It would mean users could contribute to the bandwidth costs of 
popular sites (which would certainly help sites such as kuro5hin.org, which 
have been struggling with bandwith costs). All through a simple P2P plugin for 
Mozilla.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to Slashdot
2. Wait for story with link to site with low bandwidth
3. Voila

Actually, such a system already exists, in the form of BitTorrent 
(http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/). However, such a system would really only 
be useful if there are large amounts of users. This is only really possible if 
is implemented into popular browsers.

Comment 1

[Bram Cohen]

I'm the author of BitTorrent. It actually acts as a helper application. It would
integrate with mozilla already except that I can't for the life of me figure out
what I'm doing wrong with the registry settings to make it be recognized - it's
working for IE but not mozilla.

There would be a number of technical advantages to making BitTorrent be more
tightly coupled with mozilla than acting as a helper app. The protocol will be
finalized soon, after which it will be a good idea to start working on this.

Comment 2

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

-> Networking

Comment 3

[benc]

+helpwanted
This is ready for engineering consideration.

Comment 4

[Jaap Vermeulen]

Interesting, but I have no time. Hopefully someone will pick this up.

Comment 5

[benc]

asa had some similar thoughts on this.
-> future, until someone takes ownership.

Comment 6

[Michael Lefevre]

confirming based on previous comments to get this off the UNCO radar.

Comment 7

[Ian Macfarlane]

The site ought to be able to control whether or not this occurs, i.e. it should respect all the typical "no-cache" commands (headers/meta tags).

We'd also need to know how to get around problems such as dynamic content and authenticated sessions.

This bug probably ought to depend on bug 236755 (implementing bittorrent support) even though it's not directly about supporting bittorrent files, if we are intending to use a Bittorrent-like protocol for doing this.

Comment 8

[shujingjing]

Well,perhaps it will be very beneficial to video website like youtube or IPTV.

Comment 9

[Patrick McManus [:mcmanus]]

p2p isn't out of the question, but bugzilla should be about specific work plans. A design and a patch should be requirements for reopening