[GNUnet-developers] Design Question

[Blake Matheny]

Today on the help-gnunet list, Christian said in response to a
question:

[snip]...
rough edges and common problems, we'd look really bad if we suddenly have 
100.000 users... That's also why the site says it's a beta version. 
[snip]...

My question is, lets say hypothetically that 100k people hopped on
GNUnet at the exact same time, for the first time. Lets also say that
these 100k people were also all using the exact same hosts.tar.gz from
gecko. So, 100k people all sending 1k UDP packets to the exact same
hosts.... what kind of damage is that going to do to the poor sap on
dial up, or even worse, to a major pipe like purdue has. That's a lot
of traffic to instantly hit a connection. 

Second question. Is GNUnet planning on doing any type of congestion
notification? I can't see a good way of doing this without losing some
anonymity, but maybe someone else can. I see this as being important
for when GNUnet starts being heavily utilized. Its not good enough to
drop the packet when it gets to you, the network needs to know to not
even bother sending you traffic.

Last question. Can someone explain the design/architecture/etc of key
exchange? I looked through a couple of papers but couldn't find what
I'm looking for, and I don't have time right now to go through the
code. I'm curious about the number of known nodes that are kept on
each host, etc. Mainly because of the concern I stated above about
people getting slammed with traffic, key propagation through GNUnet is
an important issue for a large user base.

Thanks.

-Blake

-- 
Blake Matheny
address@hidden
PGP-Key http://www.dbaseiv.net/purdue.key