Introduction

RFC 2810: Internet Relay Chat: Architecture
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.




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1. Introduction

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