UsenetDHT: a low-overhead design for Usenet

Usenet is a popular distributed messaging and file sharing service: servers in Usenet flood articles over an overlay network to fully replicate articles across all servers. However, replication of Usenet's full content requires that each server pay the cost of receiving (and storing) over 1 Tbyte/day. This paper presents the design and implementation of UsenetDHT, a Usenet system that allows a set of cooperating sites to keep a shared, distributed copy of Usenet articles. UsenetDHT consists of client-facing Usenet NNTP front-ends and a distributed hash table (DHT) that provides shared storage of articles across the wide area. This design allows participating sites to partition the storage burden, rather than replicating all Usenet articles at all sites. UsenetDHT requires a DHT that maintains durability despite transient and permanent failures, and provides high storage performance. These goals can be difficult to provide simultaneously: even in the absence of failures, verifying adequate replication levels of large numbers of objects can be resource intensive, and interfere with normal operations. This paper introduces Passing Tone, a new replica maintenance algorithm for DHash [7] that minimizes the impact of monitoring replication levels on memory and disk resources by operating with only pairwise communication. Passing Tone's implementation provides performance by using data structures that avoid disk accesses and enable batch operations. Microbenchmarks over a local gigabit network demonstrate that the total system throughput scales linearly as servers are added, providing 5.7 Mbyte/s of write bandwidth and 7 Mbyte/s of read bandwidth per server. UsenetDHT is currently deployed on a 12-server network at 7 sites running Passing Tone over the wide-area: this network supports our research laboratory's live 2.5 Mbyte/s Usenet feed and 30.6 Mbyte/s of synthetic read traffic. These results suggest a DHT-based design may be a viable way to redesign Usenet and globally reduce costs.