[Tech] The effect of slow nodes

[Michael Rogers]

toad wrote:
> As I've
> explained I'm skeptical about the results appearing to show that backoff
> is always bad...

Agreed, advisory backoff seems to do a pretty good job. However, without 
throttling or token passing to limit the number of searches entering the 
network it seems like it ought to collapse *eventually*, albeit at a 
much higher load than without backoff. I've run sims up to a load of 50 
with no problems - at 55 I started to get OOM errors for backoff alone, 
but I haven't looked into the causes yet.

Cheers,
Michael