performance profiling -> FPGA acceleration?

[Stuart William Card]

Has the Tahoe-LAFS code ever been profiled to identify where the
performance bottlenecks are? Especially on downloads?

Our as yet limited testing shows that Tahoe client (not server) CPU speed
limits download speed. I suspect (as yet w/o evidence) the Reed-Solomon
decoding.

If my suspicion proves correct, we could accelerate it with one of the
many RS decoder intellectual property blocks available for FPGAs. Has this
been attempted (or even discussed)?

-- 
Stuart W. Card, VP & Chief Scientist
Critical Technologies Inc. (CTI)
<stu.card at critical.com>