* * * * *

                    When multicast is slower than unicast

So I'm playing around with MDP (Multicast Dissemination Protocol) [1] and I
am underwhelmed by its performance. I have it installed on five machines. The
file I'm transfering is about 4.5MB in size and can be transferred in under
30 seconds using scp (and that's including the time it takes for me to type
in a password), so to transfer the file to four machines (the fifth is doing
the sending) should take around two minutes.

The first test I stopped after twelve minutes. Okay, so one of the machines
is a bit flaky, so I decided to drop that one from the test and run the test
again.

Ten minutes.

Also, because of the way multicast works, the sending process doesn't exactly
end when the clients have the data just in case another process joins to
receive the broadcast (I'm guessing, the documentation for MDP (Multicast
Dissemination Protocol) is scant and the help feature doesn't work [2]) so
this may not work for what we want to do.

[1] http://tang.itd.nrl.navy.mil/5522/mdp/mdp_index.html
[2] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2005/04/11.1

Email author at [email protected]

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