Fons, I'd like to hear more about this use case. Currently one of the strong points of NSM is that applications with heavy state (e.g. large audio files) know *exactly* where to put the state at the time they join the session. This eliminates the need for undesirable hacks with just storing a link to the heavy state (as was generally required with LASH). I felt like this was one of the primary requirements of Non-DAW which was not addressed by other session managers. But as far as sharing heavy state between multiple clients in a session, I have not considered the issue. It is certainly possible to permit something like that, and even as it is right now two clients could work something out peer-to-peer using the NSM server's 'broadcast' capability. If several different sessions need to share the same data, then I would say that it's reasonable just to have it stored outside of the session root, preferrably symlinked from within the session so that it could be picked up by a simple archiving process.

Perhaps someone in a situation like this might also consider using some kind of deduplicating filesystem to store their data and remove the complexity to the systems level.