[chord] Successor list and finger table size

[Emil Sit]

Hi,

On Tue, 18 January 2005 at 10:50 (-0500), qkhar002 at cs.fiu.edu wrote:
> The finger table size is O(log N) and the recommended successor list size
> is 2 log N in Chord. My question is the number of the maximum nodes should
>  be predefined! Or does the size of the lists change dynamically? How the
> nodes in the Chord system can update their list size?

In our implementation, the size of the successor list is a run-time
constant -- it is set at start-up and doesn't change for the lifetime
of the process.  We do have mechanisms in place to estimate the
total number of nodes in the network, but we do not use that to
set the size of the successor list.

On the other hand, the finger table will contain the correct number of
fingers regardless of the size of the network -- there are 160 slots for
fingers but in most networks, only the last few fingers will differ.

-- 
Emil Sit / MIT CSAIL PDOS / http://pdos.lcs.mit.edu/chord/