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Next Generation of Gnutella
ResearchBuzz writes "Wired is
reporting the
announcement of gPulp (general Purpose Location Protocol), an
open source technology for search engines. From the
article: "It is based on the Gnutella structure, an open source application originally created by
Nullsoft....Using the basic protocols originally developed for Gnutella, gPulp will search for
information across a network in real time.""
Certainly in the context of using it on a Lan to locate things this could be a very powerful tool. However how many sysadmins would like to have to secure every workstation from hackers instead of just every key server... fun stuff.
However on the internet it's doomed to failure. I followed the work on GnutellaNG for a little while and it seemed at that point to be involved in attempting to reduce the bandwidth requirements of gnutella by slimming down the protocol, whilst simultanously increasing the functions and hence bandwidth requirements.
Ultimately any P2P system is limited by the outbound bandwidth that each user has. At the moment with about 3000 host on Gnutella you are using about 1.5-2kbytes/s for each connection you have open (most ppl have 2 - 4) plus that doesn't include bandwidth left to upload or download.
Curiously though this would be the most optimum way of doing things (not gnutella in particularl but p2p) if it weren't for the fact that we have so little bandwidth at the end user.
Even cable modem users typically have only 128kbit upstream, which will only take gnutella to about the 10,000 user mark before it starts to fall over again. The same has to be true of any raw peer to peer system.
No amount of optimisation will reduce the bandwidth requirements of any search having to be executed on any host.
Freenet on the other hand is a lot smarter than that and does actually move information about in a streamlined manner. Unfortunately I fear that freenet would fall over and die right now if it were holding the terabytes of files that gnutella does - so it appears not to be the best solution either.
We need more bandwidth at end users and less at big corporations, except that would count as empowering the people and be morally repulsive to most politicians.