Hostcaches are not nessary if you make the clients automatically share their node lists with each other in order of rank with speed and relibility in mind.

this would have a spidering effect all the way down to dial up users sharing with each other and downloading from t3 cable dsl etc

keep a list of the fastest nodes and share these nodes first.


no need for host caches because the client just grabs the local ip from the preloaded list of nodes that are static and this is a changable text file witch you can download from any good gnutella site.

your basic idea is quite good, but i can think of a pretty big problem--most (all?) servent automatically set a lot maximum connection limit, and few users, even those on t3-level connections, set it much higher. each servent will fill up within seconds, moving from the top of the list on down. as it is now, the connections are randomly spread out among the entire network, causing far less load on any one particular servent at a given time. what we need is, like you say, a list of static-ip servents that can be downloaded from a high-capacity website (sourceforge might work well) by any client if the user clicks a 'find more hosts'-type button. however, the list should be parsed randomly so that everyone isn't trying to connect to the same clients in the same order. once a client finds one servent, the pongs come flying in and populate their own host cache, so the problem is only finding that first host. :)

FastTrack does this (except it has a central server to fall back on if the client can't connect to any host in its list). You have to have a way to connect clients even if they have an outdated hosts list. And it would be nice if a client could connect without having to rely on any static node. You could do this using a single multicast address containing all the current on-the-fly hostcaches. But a problem is that if an ISP blocks that address it becomes much more difficult for some users to connect. Maybe some combination of a multicast address and a hosts list would work decently?