
Why you won't be building your killer app on a distributed hash table - jawngee
http://spyced.blogspot.com/2009/05/why-you-wont-be-building-your-killer.html
======
lacker
Weird article, or maybe just a weird title. This author talks about how hard
it is to support locking in complex datastructures built on top of DHTs. That
doesn't seem like either what DHTs are good for or what a "killer app" needs.
Use a DHT for implementing your tinyurl clone, not for inventing a prefix-
range-lookup database.

~~~
evgen
Not only that, the paper he references used OpenDHT as its substrate. OpenDHT
was Sean Rhea's research project and was never designed for performance or for
the particular operations the paper authors tried to use it for (specifically,
the data structure they were attempting to implement required an atomic write
assurance for key insertion and they were forced to add a locking layer on top
of the DHT which was basically a set-and-test for a lot of the put
operations...) This is much akin to those people who try to store unstructured
data in a RDBMS and then bitch and moan about how all RDBMSs must suck because
of the poor performance they are seeing.

I know the blog author has a particular agenda to push, but one would hope
that the least we could assume is that he actually read and understood the
details of the paper he uses to bolster his claims...

