Review: Chord

This paper presents Chord, a peer-to-peer distributed hash-table
storage system. The strengths of the Chord system are twofold.
First, they are able to prove specific running times for key storage
and lookup operations. Second, their system provides consistent
hashing, which allows the system to provide tolerable performance
under churn.

The two largest weaknesses in Chord are its precision of key match as
well as what they decide to distribute. First, Chord requires exact
key matches. This may be appropriate if there existed a precise key
for a given file and that key is known. However, as Internet searches
show, human requests are often "fuzzy" in nature. Second, Chord
distributes keys evenly -- thus load-balancing key distribution.
However, this does not load-balance popularity of content. Previous
studies have shown that Internet file requests follow a Zipf like
distribution. Chord's distribution of keys can still lead to severe
bottlenecks in content request.
Received on Mon Nov 07 2005 - 02:59:55 EST