Advantages vs Disadvantages

Advantages:

In most cases, client-server architecture enables the roles and responsibilities of a computing system to be distributed among several independent computers that are known to each other only through a network. This creates an additional advantage to this architecture: greater ease of maintenance. For example, it is possible to replace, repair, upgrade, or even relocate a server while its clients remain both unaware and unaffected by that change. This independence from change is also referred to as encapsulation.

All the data is stored on the servers, which generally have far greater security controls than most clients. Servers can better control access and resources, to guarantee that only those clients with the appropriate permissions may access and change data.



Since data storage is centralized, updates to those data are far easier to administer than would be possible under a P2P paradigm. Under a P2P architecture, data updates may need to be distributed and applied to each “peer” in the network, which is both time-consuming and error-prone, as there can be thousands or even millions of peers.

Many mature client-server technologies are already available which were designed to ensure security, ‘friendliness’ of the user interface, and ease of use.

It functions with multiple different clients of different capabilities.

Disadvantages:

Traffic congestion on the network has been an issue since the inception of the client-server paradigm. As the number of simultaneous client requests to a given server increases, the server can become severely overloaded. Contrast that to a P2P network, where its bandwidth actually increases as more nodes are added, since the P2P network’s overall bandwidth can be roughly computed as the sum of the bandwidths of every node in that network.

The client-server paradigm lacks the robustness of a good P2P network. Under client-server, should a critical server fail, clients’ requests cannot be fulfilled. In P2P networks, resources are usually distributed among many nodes. Even if one or more nodes depart and abandon a downloading file, for example, the remaining nodes should still have the data needed to complete the download.