September 8, 1997

Internet View: Chat Wa its For Standard By Jason Levitt o you think you have more users on your network than you can handle? Try 1 million users in nearly every country in the world, and 1,000 servers linked to connect them all. At its current rate of growth, that's the kind of IT infrastructure that will be needed to support traffic on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) within a couple of years. IRC, a freely accessible text-based chat network, isn't a company, and there aren't any budgets riding on whether its network servers stay up. Nevertheless, IRC celebrated its ninth anniversary last month with double-digit growth that has its worldwide network of chat servers bulging and lots of important folks waiting around to find out how its growth prob lems will be solved. At the heart of the problem is IRC itself, because IRC is not only the name of a loose confederation of worldwide chat networks, it's also the name of the protocol used by those chat networks. The "relay" in Internet Relay Chat refers to the way the IRC servers pass along chat traffic to everyone who may be logged on to a chat channel. Each time someone chats on a channel, the generated network packets are relayed from server to server until they reach all participants on the channel. Although this relay method worked OK in the early years of IRC, it has reached its practical limit. It's now widely agreed that a reliable form of IP Multicast, which would offload the distribution of chat traffic onto routers instead of servers, is the principal solution to IRC's growth problems. Unfortunately, a standard for reliable IP Multicast isn't expected for at least a year. Meanwhile, concerned parties are trying to formalize future development of IRC. At the April meeting of the Internet E ngineering Task Force, representatives of Microsoft, Qualcomm, Sun Microsystems, and others met in an attempt to get IRC onto an IETF standards track. Those efforts have stalled for the moment, however, as interested parties decide which standards should be included in the next major version of IRC, called IRC version 3. Despite these uncertainties, IRC continues to flourish as the only standard protocol for text-based chat. It's used for chatting on many Internet gaming and conferencing sites; even Microsoft sells an IRC server as part of its Commercial Internet System, although Microsoft Netmeeting uses a proprietary protocol for its text-based chat. Interested in trying out IRC? The Web site www.irchelp.org is a good place to start. IRC version 3 information is being collected on www.the-project.org . Back to News in Review Send Us Your Feedback Top of the Page

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