…does it mean that one app can run across multiple CPUs? Without the app knowing?!!

The sdk site has some well-honed explanations of them, this page is a good start: https://sdk.dfinity.org/docs/developers-guide/introduction-key-concepts.html Essentially, canisters are what you deploy your app or service as. In terms of files: When you’re building a project you’ll have a few thin…

OK, but you didn’t answer my questions above, though :slight_smile:

Hi @groovee not part of the team but I think this article does a really good job: [image] A Technical Overview of the Internet Computer An explanation of the development platform’s infrastructure, and how software canisters enable web services to scale to billions of users. Reading ti…

Fair point. There are maybe a couple of ways to answer that: One app’s data will be stored on and retrievable from multiple machines/replicas on the network, related to consensus needs and also allowing faster serving similar the way traditional content delivery networks do. Concurrent calls can b…

Is it accurate to say the canister contains the code and the actor contains the state? The actor’s state can only be updated by a single thread at a time across the whole world? And each of those updates will take a few seconds to reach global consensus? Looking at the counter tutorial as an examp…

The canister is an actor, e.g. when it processes update calls. And yes, it’s possible to fork canisters. I can only recommend you to read the article mentionend above :slight_smile: [image] What exactly IS a "canister"? Developers Hi @groovee not part of the team but I th…

OK, the canister contains the code and the state and the actor. So in the counter example, if you wanted multiple counters that can tick in parallel then the app is responsible for forking off multiple canisters itself. Since you can apparently choose the canister name yourself, you could use that …

If you just wanted something like a counter per user, for example, you don’t need multiple canisters. You could store counters for all users within a single canister/actor. Unless you’re reaching for something else here? Map the user to their counter state by using the caller’s principal as a key i…

[image] Ori: You could store counters for all users within a single canister/actor. Yep, but that seems to mean one user can be updating their counter at a time, and the total update rate is one per ~2 seconds across all users?

What exactly IS a "canister"?

Developers

Gabriel September 19, 2020, 6:00pm 4

Hi @groovee not part of the team but I think this article does a really good job:

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What exactly IS a "canister"?

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