[jdev] Re: help needed to implement a P2P Chat Client

[Tijl Houtbeckers]

On Mon, 28 Aug 2006 23:28:23 +0200, Ravi <ravikapoor101 at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>> Are you sure you will save something? Creating the jingle session with
>> someone is a little expensive for the XMPP stream, there are definitely
>> more stanzas that one or two messages sent. And you have to keep the
>> session opened trough NATs, you will be using STUNs of the servers,
>> which is more load on them..
>>  I think there will not be much gain in doing the chat P2P. I guess it
>> will be easier for you, and probably cheaper, to buy more servers and
>> have more domains or some cluster of them, than writing this.
>
> Yes I agree, the concept is unproven. There is a trade off between high  
> initial session start cost vs. no cost during session. I will consider  
> your suggestion. Maybe we will start with non P2P and as the load goes  
> up and we understand the usage statistics, we can considering  
> incorporating P2P in next version of client.
>
>> Well, connection is not the right word maybe. You need to take care of
>> all resends and flow controls and everything from userspace, which is
>> error-prone. I do not know, if it is already in libjingle (well, I heard
>> something like that will be in next version), but I really do not trust
>> it can possibly work as well as in-kernel TCP stack.
>
> I was more considering using TCP (port 80) rather than UDP to avoid all  
> these issues you mentioned. I am certainly not going to write networking  
> stack just for a chat client.
>
> I have an idea of what I am up against. As well as little surprised that  
> nobody tried P2P for chat. I will reconsider my options.

Link local messaging (serverless IM) is p2p:
http://www.jabber.org/jeps/jep-0174.html

Not what you're trying to do, but it shows some clients already make  
client to client connections.