File sharing software

[Jay Nelson]

Yariv Sadan wrote:

> Jay,
>
> It's funny you bring up this article, because I developed Pando's P2P  
> core in C, and actually looked at Erlang as a potential language for  
> some backend components. I'm not an Erlang expert, but I did quite a  
> lot of research into it and found its unique clustering features and  
> high level semantics quite appealing. Some issues that I didn't find  
> very reassuring, however, were mnesia's rather limited table size (2  
> GB according to http://www.erlang.org/doc/doc-5.4.13/lib/ 
> stdlib-1.13.12/doc/html/index.html) and unsuitability for handling  
> large blobs (noted at http://www.erlang.org/ml-archive/erlang- 
> questions/199910/msg00059.html). (By the way, if anybody knows of  
> solutions to these issues, please let me know.)
>
It doesn't seem necessary to use mnesia or blobs in a P2P scheme.  The 
data can be kept on the users' machines.  All that is needed are the 
addresses and the buddy connections, although I can see why you might 
want to upload to a 24x7 server.  Binaries will do nicely in place of 
blobs, especially since this application has no editing and merely 
copies the data around to other nodes.

A big index of users doesn't require a database either, but I can see 
why that is the approach most people use.

jay