We propose PolderCast, a P2P topic-based Pub/Sub system that is (a) fault-tolerant and robust, (b) scalable w.r.t the number of nodes interested in a topic and number of topics that nodes are interested in, and (c) fast in terms of dissemination latency while (d) attaining a low communication overhead. This combination of properties is provided by an implementation that blends deterministic propagation over maintained rings with probabilistic dissemination following a limited number of random shortcuts. The rings are constructed and maintained using gossiping techniques. The random shortcuts are provided by two distinct peer-sampling services: Cyclon generates purely random links while Vicinity produces interest-induced random links.

We analyze PolderCast and survey it in the context of existing approaches. We evaluate PolderCast experimentally using real-world workloads from Twitter and Facebook traces. We use widely renowned Scribe [5] as a baseline in a number of experiments. Robustness with respect to node churn is evaluated through traces from the Skype super-peer network. We show that the experimental results corroborate all of the above properties in settings of up to 10K nodes, 10K topics, and 5K topics per-node.