[tahoe-dev] warning: Boing-Boinging imminent

[Zooko O'Whielacronx]

Last time I checked there were two servers on the Test Grid that had
latencies > 1 second for every request. They were the ones named
"sunpal" and "linuxpal". Yep, I see that they are still connected:
http://pubgrid.tahoe-lafs.org/

This partly shows how the Test Grid is serving two incompatible purposes:

Purpose 1: demonstrating the behavior and performance of Tahoe-LAFS to
curious newcomers

Purpose 2: experimenting with how Tahoe-LAFS handles an uncontrolled
and dynamic set of servers, and failure and degraded conditions

Now that Tahoe-LAFS v1.8.0 is out the door I intend to experiment with
setting up a new "Demo Grid" which is high performance and high
reliability. Demo Grid could serve purpose 1 and Test Grid could serve
purpose 2.

Atlas Networks and Rackspace have each contributed some servers to our
open source project, and I'm thinking of maybe setting up the Demo
Grid to be comprised solely of servers operated by those two
companies.

In the meantime, yeah, Boing Boing readers may experience very slow
behavior or outright failure if they try to *write* to pubgrid and
they unluckily hit sunpal or linuxpal. But *reads* should perform very
nicely regardless since v1.8.0 has such nice server-selection on
immutable file read.

Regards,

Zooko