id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	priority	milestone	component	version	resolution	keywords	cc	launchpad_bug
398	allow users to disable use of helper: direct uploads might be faster	warner		"It occurred to me and Zandr that clients with fast uplinks may achieve faster
throughput by not using the helper at all. The protocol improvements in #397
are nice and all, but really it's the helper that's getting overloaded. The
purpose of the helper was to allow folks with slow uplinks to avoid paying
the 3x expansion penalty on the wrong end of the wire, but folks with
multi-megabit uplinks don't really need this help. At those speeds, sending
3x shares directly to the storage servers will get faster uploads than
sending 1x ciphertext to an overloaded helper.

We might manage to farm out the helpers enough to improve performance to make
this not true, but fundamentally the goal of a distributed system is to
reduce centralization and push the work out to the edge. The helper is a
concession to improving user experience with slow uplinks, but on fast
uplinks it should probably not be used.

So the task is to give advanced end users of the commercial service a way to
not use the helper. Simply deleting or renaming BASEDIR/helper.furl and
restarting the node would suffice, but it might be nice to have a better UI
for this. The goal is to let users with fast uplinks try it both ways and see
which gives them better service.

Eventually, we might consider having the node automatically decide whether to
use the helper or not, based upon the upload speeds measured by the first few
direct uploads.
"	task	closed	major	undecided	code-encoding	1.0.0	invalid	helper performance upload bandwidth	ussjoin@…