a couple of years ago, distributed.net ran into a problem on thier servers. most people were still cracking 2*28 blocks of the RC5-64 project. In 1996 these blocks were a good size. they took most people about an hour to do one, and we only uploaded every 10 blocks.

200,000 people, uploading every 10 hours.

however with the advancement of computers, i can now process a 2*28 block in about 55 seconds, and we usually upload every 25 blocks

200,000 people, uploading every 20 minutes

as you can imagine, they had to increase the size of the blocks, and BEG people not to process lots of the smallest increments. their servers are donation based, and the networks were getting clogged.



How are we doing on this front? it seems we have about 2000 people actively searching, most are probably using 5000 structures as thier upload threshold. (i use 10k, as are most on this board) if my computer was average (thunderbird 1333, seems average nowadays) that would mean an update about every 35 minutes. are the servers and networks holding up well under this load?

if you can wager a guess, how many people do you think the current network could support before we would have to do one of the following.

increase the maximum threshold from 10K
Have the clients begin only uploading structures deemed usefull
perform major upgrades to the network


(FYI, the main resason i'm curious to this info is because i dont want CNN to advertise our project just yet if we're not able to handle the load)

as you can see, i've posted a lot since i found this project just a short week ago. i'm very interested and want to know exactly what state of affairs it's in. i followed the human genome project all the way through high school, i love that i might be able to help it out now. i hope you dont get sick of my questions.

Sean