Re: [Sks-devel] Optimum number of gossip peers; mailsync with PKS network

[Yaron Minsky]

I think the optimal thing would simply to have everyone in your peer list.  I don't think you lose anything to that, but it's a pain to maintain.  I think there are some theoretical results suggesting that one can do with O(log n) peers where n is the size of the network, assuming the peers are chosen at random.

In practice, gossip is pretty damn robust.  I generally think 5-10 peers is about right, and one shouldn't need to change that too much as the system grows.  For reasonable values of n, log n is constant.

I like a sync frequency of roughly a minute.  That means the overall network distributes updates pretty quickly -- basically you should expect an update to have fully percolated within 10 minutes.  Since each gossip reconciles -all- differences, you don't need to change the gossip rate as the update rate changes.  And updating once  a minute is pretty light in terms of resource usage.

y

On 10/29/07, Jonathan Oxer <address@hidden> wrote:

Thanks to all the peering offers I now have 6 gossip partners for
keys.keysigning.org, which got me thinking about the optimal number in a
mesh network. There's obviously overhead in the sync protocol and it's
wasteful to check more frequently than there are changes to propagate,
so the theoretical optimum check frequency would vary inversely with the
number of peering partners and proportionally with the rate of changes.

Short version: how many peering partners is normal?

Also, now that SKS gossip is working I want to set up mailsync to the
PKS network. The 2004 docs on the wiki said that permission should be
requested before adding a PKS server to the mailsync file, but then says
that address@hidden can be added without requesting
permission.

Is there more up-to-date information about PKS sync? What's the current
best approach?

Cheers   :-)
--
Jonathan Oxer
Ph +61 3 9723 9399

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