Okay ... I have some Matrix confusion (my default setting) and could use some help.

Situation:
Mr. Bodyguard has a valuable recording of his last job stored on his commlink. Unfortunately, after a night of drinking he mentioned this at a public bar.

Hacker1 wants to steal this recording to use as blackmail. He Hacks on the Fly to create a Security account and starts digging around.

...but wait! Two other hackers also overhear the conversation and manage to Hack on the Fly to create their own security accounts. Seeing that there is already competition for the goods, they set their Agents (already loaded on their own commlinks) to fight each other and start searching.

My question (finally):

None of these programs/personas/agents are loaded directly onto Mr. Bodyguard's commlink. Therefore, is it ok that 3 personas, 2 agents, and about 30 programs are active in here at once (besides any Mr. Bodyguard has running)? Is there any degradation in the node from this?

Shouldn't be, because I/O speed has no hard rules attached to it in 4th. And I don't personally think there's anything wrong with this, since the 30 programs are only interacting with each other in the most peripheral of ways, the personas are largely running on their home nodes as well, and the agents are just querying dats. This is like if I remote login to your computer, but it only updates what I'm doing each time I input a command. That won't slow you down much.

They need to fundementally fix the MAtrix stuff.

The power/etc you have should be limited by which ever is LOWER the node you are hacking FROM and the node you are hacking To.

Subscription limits should also work both ways, and not be /per persona/ but be per system.

No, I disagree there, because it fundamentally breaks the necessities of the genre: that hacking is both useful and doable. Also, because *right now* I am doing ten bajillion things to an Xbox dev kit that involve a ton of programs but doesn't slow the dev kit down any, because said programs are all running on this computer except for when I execute specific commands on the dev kit, and then all it does it give me basic data. Subscription by node... sure, maybe. I haven't looked at the fallout that would cause, but that seems more reasonable.

Yeah, but if you're remoted into another machine, and doing harddrive searches that does slow the machine down.

Data Search+browse /really/ ought to be run on the target PC.

Sure, but it doesn't slow *my* computer down all that much. I don't think it would slow down a super-machine from 2072 capable of giving me full sensory input by a noticeable amount unless it was a toaster with several thousand people dialing in, giving it toast orders. Think of it like a network printer: do multiple print orders appreciably slow the printer down? Not to the extend that you'll notice, no. Functionally, print spooling is only slowed byt paper jams, even when many people are feeding print jobs to the network printer, because only the "print" command is transmitted until the printer has time to actually recieve the documents to be printed.

Basically, you CAN make it so certain programs are run on the target node, but I don't think the bookkeeping would make it worthwhile, for the most part. In a perfect world, I'd love to have that kind of thing simulated, but *I* sure as hell don't wanna keep track of it.

Edit: To make myself clearer, a search function on one of my drives here at work will slow down that drive to the point where I'll notice, yes. There's no search index on that drive. But if you run a search on my other drive, it won't, because everything on that drive is indexed to hell and back. I can run a findstr on that drive and tell it "Find me all XML and XAML files with the phrase "dingus" in them within these directories, and show me where in the file it appears." It takes about 3 seconds, but doesn't slow anything else down, because it's just referencing the index tables and then double-checking to make sure nothing slipped by. I don't know how those index tables work, or how they're so small, or why it's fast, or any of that. I just know that's what I experience.