Performance of Tonika vs Kademlia

[James Nelson]

Hi Petar,

I have been reading a bit about both Kademlia and Tonika today. My
understanding is that Tonika is less susceptible to Sybil attacks than
Kademlia. I am don't have any understanding of the sacrifice that
Tonika makes in the number of hops looking for a file to accomplish
this, though. Also, I assume that if a file needs to be passed back
through many nodes that it will be noticably slower in this regard as
well.

Obviously, these tradeoffs make sense in applications you envisage for
Tonika. That said, I am curious to your opinion on how some of the
same principles (which I admittedly don't understand too well yet)
applied to networks like Kademlia would turn out.

My question is that assuming in a Tonika-like network you kept the
principle where you only send messages through friends while *looking*
for data, but sent your IP address and public key along the way, and
the resulting data was sent back directly to the requester, how would
the number of hops compare to Kademlia, and would it lower
susceptability of the network to Sybil attacks? Obviously it wouldn't
provide any anonymity, but in the application I am considering this
isn't a problem.

Thanks for your time :)

[Petar Maymounkov]

Hi James,

The number of hops in Tonika is equal to the typical diameter of a social
graph, which has been measured to be the same as in Kademlia.

Tonika actually has much better caching properties than Kademlia,
so if you are talking about using Tonika as a web infrastructure,
it may be faster than Kademlia. I don't know yet, because there aren't
enough users.

If you are not caching content there is still a possibility that it will be
as fast or faster, because there is plenty of research showing that
intelligent multihop overlay routing can be faster than Internet direct routing,
because Internet's routing protocols are very inefficient actually.
But we've yet to test this in practice as Tonika grows.

And in some strong math sense, TOnika is not just "more" resilient to
Sybil Attacks it is extremely resilient. There are ways to quantify this but
they don't fit in an email ;)

Hope this helps.

--Petar