User talk:Zha Ewry/AWG: Desiderata for evaluating the proposed design

In the Plug and proxy models section, it's worth mentioning that the matter of proxies (and caches, which are strongly related) is very important on the distribution/scalability front as well. When a private world machine or small external grid attaches to a large enterprise grid like that of LL, the influx of visitors from large to small would almost always overwhelm the small site in the absence of a proxy and caching mechanism within the large site, as a natural consequence of their relative scales.

Consequently, the concept of proxy needs to be expanded substantially for a scalable distributed world system, ie. to cache external state and to handle much of the object-related traffic that would otherwise all be funnelled out to the small system on every access. Without this, large systems will never be able to connect to small ones in a manner that would satisfy their residents, because the small systems would always be "Slashdotted", to coin a phrase. --Morgaine Dinova 03:34, 24 September 2007 (PDT)

Although each attached grid would naturally be authoritative for its own contained objects, the degree of passthrough of object transactions needs to be a tunable parameter to cater for the disparity in sizes. For example a world on a laptop might receive transactions at only 1/1000th the rate at which its objects held within the caching proxy are accessed on the large grid to which it is attached. A rough analogy with the DNS system and also with transparent web proxies might help visualize the kind of relationships required in this area for scalability in a distributed system. --Morgaine Dinova 03:52, 24 September 2007 (PDT)