Thursday, November 16, 2006
Killer Feature

So I'm in the process of setting up a new way to send files through chungles -- via multicast/UDP. What does this mean to those who don't know what multicasting is? One transfer, multiple recipients. That is, user A can make one transfer at the speed of one transfer (theoretically) to users B, C, D, E, and so on. I'm really excited about this feature as it'll be ideal for situations where you want to share something with all your friends or colleagues but don't want to go through either setting up a server which will require several simultaneous transfers, or bringing a usb thumb drive to everyone's computer, etc. Chungles will have the option for a multicast share folder where multicasted files can be stored and the UI will have a button which allows the user to multicast a file to all chungles clients on the network.

The only trouble with multicasting, which has UDP often referred to as unreliable, is that packets are often not delivered. In the case of file sending, every packet needs to arrive, so I have to develop a fallback system. I will probably use the default chungles TCP server for the fallback mechanism. I figure if you're sending a 500mb file to 20 users, with a packet loss rate of 1%, you have to resend 5mb of packets to 20 people (=600mb total sent), which is better than having to send 500mb 20x (=10GB total sent) over a reliable protocol.

I'll hopefully have a rudimentary version of this in the SVN repository soon.
posted by Alex at 3:55 PM 0 comments



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