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  14    <H1>[IRCServices] New IRC protocol revised</H1>
  15     <B>Andrew Church</B>
  16     <A HREF="mailto:ircservices%40ircservices.za.net?Subject=%5BIRCServices%5D%20New%20IRC%20protocol%20revised&In-Reply-To="
  17        TITLE="[IRCServices] New IRC protocol revised">achurch at dragonfire.net
  18        </A><BR>
  19     <I>Wed Oct  6 19:52:50 PDT 1999</I>
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  34 <PRE>&gt;<i>Andy, I don't want to be rude or anything but why would anyone want to have
  35 </I>&gt;<i>a network where servers are connected in a circular fashion?
  36 </I>
  37      Two words:  No netsplits.  Well, few netsplits, certainly compared to
  38 the current tree-style networks.  Until the Internet becomes as stable as
  39 the telephone network--which to be honest I can't see happening in the near
  40 future; I'm honestly scared shitless at the thought of ordinary phone calls
  41 being routed over the Internet--links are going to drop out occasionally
  42 for no fault of the servers, and to avoid problems arising from that we
  43 need redundancy at a higher level, like the IRC network level.
  44
  45 &gt;<i>It would require additional bandwidth
  46 </I>
  47      This is partly the fault of my algorithm--complete graphs will cause
  48 quite a bunch of unnecessary messages to be sent; I'll see about fixing
  49 that--but even then, the difference shouldn't be significant for most
  50 cases.  For example, a 3-node &quot;loop&quot; network will send 4 copies of a
  51 global message where only 2 are required; but a 6-node &quot;loop&quot; network will
  52 send 6 where 5 are required, a much less significant excess.
  53
  54      And if this does bother you so much, there's nothing saying you
  55 _have_ to link your servers in a cyclic network.  Cyclic networks are a
  56 significant part of my specification, but hardly the only part.  There's
  57 also (1) internationalization--in case you hadn't noticed, English is not
  58 the only language in the world (have you tried using a Japanese nickname
  59 on a standard IRC server recently?); (2) binary protocol, allowing
  60 anything to be sent as a message (think audio/video on a LAN), reducing
  61 computation time (no more strcmp's on commands and such), and somewhat
  62 reducing bandwidth use; and (3) it's about time _someone_ put out a
  63 protocol specification to do something about the gazillions of different
  64 variations out there.
  65
  66 &gt;<i>Not
  67 </I>&gt;<i>forgetting additional RAM required for the ircd to remember that it has
  68 </I>&gt;<i>various paths to send data to reach server x.
  69 </I>
  70      What, 2 bytes per server (ID of the next server on the shortest path)?
  71 If memory is that tight, stop using a 20-year-old computer.
  72
  73 &gt;<i>Currently the DALnet implementation of irc protocol is quite good, well
  74 </I>&gt;<i>actually the best comparing it to ircu, irce etc. etc.
  75 </I>
  76      I won't argue that DALnet's implementation is not good.  I just don't
  77 think it's not possible to come up with a better one (whether mine is
  78 better is something I'll leave up to others).
  79
  80      I also ought to practice not using so many negatives at once.
  81
  82   --Andrew Church
  83     <A HREF="http://www.ircservices.za.net/mailman/listinfo/ircservices">achurch at dragonfire.net</A>
  84     <A HREF="http://achurch.dragonfire.net/">http://achurch.dragonfire.net/</A>
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  88
  89 </PRE>
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