RFC 2810 (rfc2810) - Page 2 of 10
Internet Relay Chat: Architecture
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 2810 Internet Relay Chat: Architecture April 2000
5.2.3 To A List ......................................... 6
5.3 One-To-All ............................................. 6
5.3.1 Client-to-Client .................................. 6
5.3.2 Client-to-Server .................................. 7
5.3.3 Server-to-Server .................................. 7
6. Current Problems ........................................... 7
6.1 Scalability ............................................ 7
6.2 Reliability ............................................ 7
6.3 Network Congestion ..................................... 7
6.4 Privacy ................................................ 8
7. Security Considerations .................................... 8
8. Current Support And Availability ........................... 8
9. Acknowledgements ........................................... 8
10. References ................................................ 8
11. Author's Address .......................................... 9
12. Full Copyright Statement .................................. 10
1. Introduction
The IRC (Internet Relay Chat) protocol has been designed over a
number of years for use with text based conferencing. This document
describes its current architecture.
The IRC Protocol is based on the client-server model, and is well
suited to running on many machines in a distributed fashion. A
typical setup involves a single process (the server) forming a
central point for clients (or other servers) to connect to,
performing the required message delivery/multiplexing and other
functions.
This distributed model, which requires each server to have a copy
of the global state information, is still the most flagrant problem
of the protocol as it is a serious handicap, which limits the maximum
size a network can reach. If the existing networks have been able to
keep growing at an incredible pace, we must thank hardware
manufacturers for giving us ever more powerful systems.
2. Components
The following paragraphs define the basic components of the IRC
protocol.
2.1 Servers
The server forms the backbone of IRC as it is the only component
of the protocol which is able to link all the other components
together: it provides a point to which clients may connect to talk to
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