A few years ago a company with hundreds of offices wrote to us: BeeBEEP had flooded their network. Their offices could not talk to each other, but every BeeBEEP could still see all the others, and kept trying to connect to people it would never reach. That story taught the lesson behind this part of the new BeeBEEP: seeing someone on the network is not the same as being able to reach them.
Measured, not guessed
This time nothing is left to guesswork. A test bench starts hundreds of BeeBEEPs on one machine and measures everything: how many bytes each one sends, how many connections it opens, how long a newcomer takes to see everyone else. Every change is measured before and after, on a network of ten as well as on one of hundreds.
What changed
- Silence when nothing happens. BeeBEEPs used to exchange the whole list of who is online, over and over. Now they compare a short fingerprint of it and send the list only when something differs: in a quiet network of 200 users, that traffic dropped from about 10 kilobytes per second on each computer to a few bytes.
- Calls with good manners. Every connection attempt has a reason, a budget and a limit. An attempt that fails is retried after longer and longer pauses, and BeeBEEP remembers which parts of the network do not answer, instead of knocking on the same door forever.
- Crowds welcome. In the test where 300 users connect one after another to the same colleague, before this work 24 of them got in and then everything choked. Now practically all of them get in.
- Hello and goodbye. Every BeeBEEP announces itself with a signed message, and says goodbye when it closes. One that disappears without a word, a laptop closed or a cable pulled, is noticed within a minute.
In an office of ten people none of this shows, and that is the point: BeeBEEP stays as quick as it is today in a small office, and keeps going when the office becomes a company.