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Mateon1 | 8 years ago

While I haven't looked for more info, I can assure you IPFS is a slower protocol than HDFS.

The existing IPFS implementation involves a lot of overhead in memory, CPU use, and latency [and as you can see in the MapReduce bar graph, it's slower], but overall, it improves performance when bandwidth is the bottleneck.

IPFS is pretty similar to BitTorrent, just more practical.

discuss

XR0CSWV3h3kZWg|8 years ago

Why do you say bittorrent isn't practical?

Mateon1|8 years ago

BitTorrent isn't "not practical". It is however less practical than IPFS.

With IPFS, you can effortlessly link from one tree to another, already existing tree.

In BitTorrent, you have to include a .torrent file, or an infohash in some file, but no software that I know of will easily follow that link.

This linking ability is an extremely useful property, that allows you to cheaply create a copy of a merkle tree, with a subset of the data replaced. The tree will operate identically to one created from scratch.

You also don't need to hold all the data to "patch" the tree, which I imagine is useful in this Hadoop filesystem.

Unfortunately there is no real API for operating on torrents. You could say WebTorrent is pushing in the right direction to fix this, but there doesn't seem to be much adoption for it.