Either the top vaults will be preferred, or they won’t.
I just analyzed the both scenarios and I hoped to show that the details impact anything.
A non-cached chunk has 4 replicas. Let’s say you read 2 non-cached chunks.
- If you direct your requests to the best vault for each of them, you get fast performance.
- If you don’t do that, then one of the requests will likely get to a less than best vault. The larger the request, the more likely it is that you’ll get your file at the speed served by the slowest of the qualified farmers.
Imagine requesting a 1 GB file, which is then obtained from approximately 1,000 vaults. You’ll be done when the slowest chunk arrives. It’s a simple concept.
Next, you consider whether you can handle 1 GB of data in near real-time, because even the slowest working vault could send you the chunk you requested within 2 seconds. This is what gives the devs some flexibility (say, direct to fastest vaults if the file is under 10 MB, direct to Tiers 1 & 2 for 10-100 MB, and direct to any for files over 100 MB), it’s not exactly rocket science.
But I don’t think these details are not essential for people to state their support or objections to one of these reward mechanisms (even regardless of which will be implemented by SAFE). (Although this should be discussed in another topic).