I have thought for some time that texture loading causes a lot of clogging for the hosting server who is plagued with an influx of avis who request all the textures within sight.

But since textures on a grid come from a common asset server, what if ANY server in the grid could cache and serve texture requests from any region in the grid? We could avoid clogging any single network interface, and distribute load to grid servers which are idle or least busy… and the asymmetric nature of most broadband connections would allow for a massive bandwidth spike (much like bittorrent) to satisfy the client’s texture requests relatively quickly, even as the server the client is in is busy dealing with things like physics and communications.

Just a thought…