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by happybeing 2238 days ago
There will be pros and cons in access speed. I expect some latency compared to a CDN that is caching close to the client, but not necessarily significant.

And some things may even be faster because chunks are served from random locations meaning a server is not a bottleneck. So it's a bit like having a CDN for free.

This should work particularly well for large files because chunks will be delivered in parallel by lots of different vaults in different locations, along different routes.

Also, there will be opportunistic caching of popular chunks along the route to the client. So data that is suddenly in demand will be cached rather than overloading the vaults holding the chunks - so u have automatic DDoS protection.

Because of that any site will scale automatically to meet demand without cost or extra server side infrastructure. Some really attractive bonuses there for anyone from a lone developer to a large scale commercial operation.

The actual performance will I think be better for some use cases, worse for others but we won't know the details for a bit yet.

I'm a developer interested in putting decentralised apps on the SAFE Network so have done some testing of the early APIs and tried deploying simple websites on the test networks, porting apps from the Solid project, RemoteStorage etc.

I tried different frameworks to see how easily they could be used, how they would perform, and help others get started.

For example I had excellent results with my first use of ReactStatic (see https://dweb.happybeing.com) but I was very impressed when I tried Svelte for the first time because it's a really nice framework and very fast.

But any web framework should work well for many kinds of app, but I'm smitten by Svelte so will build using that for the time being.

You will be able to use pretty much any language or platform though because language bindings are being made available for the SAFE API and are I understand fairly easy to create yourself if the one you want hasn't been created yet.

1 comments

Thanks for the insight and sharing your experience on the network.
I think higher latency will be expected as the nodes you are connected will be randomly assigned geographically, which is necessary for anonymity and security goals of the network.

But the download speed itself should be faster than what typical CDNs might offer, as all chunks could be downloaded in parallel, and in some cases the experience could be felt as instantaneous. The effect would be a network where all content within the SAFE network would be like torrenting with guaranteed number of seeds with 100% uptime. The only limitation would be your local bandwidth.