[whatwg] Web-sockets + Web-workers to produce a P2P website or application

[Mike Hearn]

WebSockets doesn't let you open arbitrary ports and listen on them,
so, I don't think it can be used for what you want.

P2P in general is a lot more complicated than it sounds. It sort of
works for things like large movies and programs because they aren't
latency sensitive and chunk ordering doesn't matter (you can wait till
the end then reassemble).

But it has problems:

- A naive P2P implementation won't provide good throughput or latency
because you might end up downloading files from a mobile phone on the
other side of the world rather than a high performance CDN node inside
your local ISP. That sucks for users and also sucks for your ISP who
will probably find their transit links suddenly saturated and their
nice cheap peering links with content providers sitting idle.

- That means unless you want to have your system throttled (or in
companies/universities, possibly banned) you need to respect network
topology and have an intimate understanding of how it works. For
example the YouTube/Akamai serving systems have this intelligence but
whatever implementation you come up with won't.

- P2P is far more complicated than an HTTP download. I never use
BitTorrent because it basically never worked well for me, compared to
a regular file download. You don't see it used much outside the pirate
scene and distributing linux ISOs these days for that reason, I think.

Your friends problem has other possible solutions:

1) Harvesting low hanging fruit:
1a) Making sure every static asset is indefinitely cacheable (use
those ISP proxy caches!)
1b) Ensuring content is being compressed as effectively as possible
1c) Consider serving off a CDN like Akamai or Limelight. There is
apparently a price war going on right now.

and of course the ultimate long term solution

2) Scaling revenues in line with traffic