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Gnutella Not Scaling?
cbull writes "ZDNet Music has an article that makes an argument that "Gnutella is Going Down in Flames". Basically, the argument is that Gnutella isn't as scalable as Napster."
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I have finally done it! I've traveled back in time and read an article that was posted on Slashdot two weeks ago. Wooohooo! I'm going to be rich!
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Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
Well, this is just shooting from the hip, but someone should look into writing an improved client for broadband connected users. This client would feature caching of results to and from its immediate connections, and perhaps out to two or 3 nodes distant.
If you've got a big pipe, and you're going to be connected to gnutella for awhile, this would improve the performance of your client and those closest to you.
Of course, if you really want improvement, you'd have to build this capability into the protocol. Allow clients to register as either low or high bandwidth. Then low bandwidth clients could do anything, but traffic could only go through them for a level or two. Ideally, you'd want every client to be able to reach a high-bandwidth node within 3-5 hops. A connected client would then note and rely upon these distribution nodes to do the work. Perhaps even reconnect to distributors directly...
Just a thought. Isn't this the kind of thing that Freenet already does?
Xentax
You shouldn't verb words.
http://www.bigredh.com
http://www.thestar.com/thestar/back_issues/ED20000 812/money/20000812BUS01b_FI-HOTLINE.html
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get jiggy w/ ayn rand!
Why is it that people who have never even looked at a gnutella packet stream or contributed a line of code to a client are so damn willing to offer their worthless, uninformed opinions (I'm reacting more to the lame-ass article on ZDNet but the article I'm replying to qualifies also)? Anyone who has taken a close look at the traffic is aware that gnutella has been subject to a denial of service attack ever since the first injunction against Napster was almost enforced. The goal of this attack is to convince the deep thinkers on the net that gnutella "will not scale" and hence to give up on true peer to peer networking in favor of whatever the RIAA does with Napster once they manage to steal the technology with the aid of their judicial accomplices.
For those who have not bothered to read, every gnutella packet has a TTL (time to live which really translates to hops to live) so that it only gets seen by at most 'TTL' nodes which is supposed to be 7 by default. For those keeping track that means there is really nothing that needs to be 'scaled' regardless of how many total nodes there are. Packets on a "well behaved" network will die a natural death before causing a melt down. We were handling large networks (thousands of distinct nodes) just fine before the attacks began. What we have to do now is release clients that defend against the DOS attack and get enough such nodes out there to restore the previous performance.
Again for those who have not looked at the issue, the way you can mount an attack on gnutella is to set up as many clients as you can that don't route back any responses and at the same time spew out an unending stream of pings and possibly nonsense search queries (meant to load other clients but not produce query response packets). One way to fight back is to drop all pings on connections that have an inordinate proportion of pings and drop connections that appear to be generating too many queries that don't result in any responses. The first strategy is easy to impement and is in the current version of Mactella. The second is harder and is under development now.
Those who are loudly proclaiming that gnutella is failing because it does not 'scale' are little more than unwitting dupes of the sinister forces that are trying to generate precisely that impression. It may be true that it can't adapt to overcome malicious attacks but that is far from proven at this point.
erm. this seems like a problem that is solvable in any number of ways. Replication seems to be easiest. Cache popular content onto fast pipes (provisions for bandwidth limiting are assumed). Encode a forwarding requirement into the protocol -- every file you download, you have to allow someone to grab that file from you. Use multicast and PPV style scheduling (requesters register for a file, letting the server determine when (within a short timeperiod) to multicast it).
I suprised by this being an issue at all. I haven't looked at the gnutella infrastructure, but these are issues that I would have thought tackled during the initial design.
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I don't know if anybody else has noticed this, but all of the Unix clients for Gnutella suck. They seem to range from the unbeliveably confusing and undocumented console mode applications (gnut) to crash prone X applications (gnubile -- never runs more than once between reinstalls!) to leech only clients (gtk-gnutella).
I'm not going to connect just to leech files, which basically leaves me with 0 options for the client. Plus it seems like the majority of the users are leeches on there already, and those that aren't are on modem connections (and always disconnect the instant someone starts to snag a file from them).
That's my $0.02
I read the internet for the articles.
The problem is quite obvious and has been around as long as peer-to-peer and server based networks have both existed. Peer-to-peer networks work wonderfully when they're small. Server based networks are much more effiecent and thereby are nearly always used for large networks. Can Gnutella still work? Yes, but it will have be divided into smaller networks... For example: You have separate networks for: Pop MP3s Rock MP3s Country MP3s Rap MP3s Jazz MP3s Movies Warez..err..Shareware Of course, each network should have a critical mass and then divide in half when it reaches that point. Wow, maybe I should get programming...
There is interesting tendency:
Napser has central server, keep information on client side, and it works.
Gnutella does not have central server but still keep information on client side, and it barely works.
Freenet does not have central server, and does not keep information on client side, and it is not practically usable (yeah, I know it's the most promising technology, but still...).
Also all of them call themselves peer-to-peer but napster actually has central server, and freenet do not have second peer to connect to at all. Did somebody can tell me what is it - P2P?
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nothing you idiots, Mr Cray's dead
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yeah, I probably got a couple of screws up in my head loose
but no worse than what's goin on in your sister's webcam (eheheheh)
sometimes, I wanna get on ZD and just let loose
but cant, but it's cool for RMS to hump a dead GNU
My mouse is on your link, My mouse is on your link
and if you're lucky, I might just give it a little click
and that's the message that we deliver to little kids
and expect them not to know what a free software is
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they got MS-NBC, dont they?
we ain't nothing but omnivores
well, some of us carnivores
who read other people's mail like crackwhores
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then there's no reason that a man can't forge spam from your account
but if you feel like I feel, I got the antedote
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and hear em argue over who modded it down first
little troll, flamed me back on IRC
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I should download some audio on MP3
and show the world how you released it BSD (aaaaaah)
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all you other Bruce Perens' are just imitating
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please stand up, please stand up
cause I'm Bruce Perens, yes, I'm the real Perens
all you other Bruce Perens' are just imitating
so wont the real Bruce Perens please stand up,
please stand up, please stand up
I'm Bruce Perens, yes, I'm the real Perens
all you other Bruce Perens' are just imitating
so wont the real Bruce Perens please stand up,
please stand up, please stand up
cause I'm Bruce Perens, yes, I'm the real Perens
all you other Bruce Perens' are just imitating
so wont the real Bruce Perens please stand up,
please stand up, please stand up
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fuck it let's all stand up
Will the real Bruce Perens Please Stand Up
Wouldn't it be easier just to implement bandwidth-based routing, instead of specifying minimum bandwidth in the search? Right now, I think the search goes to everyone and the low-bandwidth answers are filtered out. If a node were not to forward searches for which nothing can be returned anyway, you can avoid wasting time and bandwidth. All it requires is that the high-bandwdth servers be well-connected, which could be induced by allowing preferences for higher-bandwidth links...
-_Quinn
Reality Maintenance Group, Silver City Construction Co., Ltd.
I don't think Gnutella is dead quite yet, but you make a good point.
The idea of pre-categorizing the Gnutella network by file type makes good sense. Split the system into Gnutella for mp3s, Gnutella for software, Gnutella for trolls, Gnutella for pictures, etc...
This would drastically reduce the size of each network subsection, and would help keep things to a reasonable size for searches. Plus, your results would be more likely to be relevant, due to the fact that everything on that particular network section is at least of the type you are looking for.
This is the problem with ALL distributed architectures. Its an N^2 problem.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Freenet is of course an approach to peer to peer file sharing that tries to address these scalability issues. Shame the article doesn't mention it.
Eventually it will find its own level anyway...
Impatient larval warez doods will move on to something that better suits them.
People who use it and like using it will continue to use it.
The secret of success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you've got it made. (Marx)
The Freenet people haven't figured out how to do distrbuted searches efficiently yet, although they realize that's a problem. They may well crack that problem, but probably not quickly.
Has everyone else noticed that they get a strange sensation of deja-vu whenever reading slashdot. It is rare to find something which is actually news (and new). Perhaps the geeks of the world need to create some more news, to keep slashdot fed and healthy......
*nod* And the search capabilities seem to be remarkably moronic. On a friend's computer, I watched him wade through all sorts of files that weren't even germane to the parameters he'd searched for. In the end, it all comes down to how people describe the files they are sharing over Gnutella.
.mp3 he was looking for... it took him a while, but the thing of it is, some of these files he couldn't find at all on Napster.
On the plus side, he eventually did manage to find every single
Is there any reasonable way to determine usage stats for Gnutella?
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Therefore it is as scaleable as you want it to be. It is stuff like this that reminds me of the good-ol-days when one had to bitch and whine about missing features, and wait around until the people developing said features would come out of the woodwork.
There are still people like that in the world today. What a shame! It seems that ZDnet likes to cater to this crowd. So now they are bitching to an entire community, of which they were - by default - invited to participate.
When Gnutella first came out I used it quite alot. Then I stopped downloading for awhile because of connectivitiy issues, then a few months later with new versions the service just seemed slower. Think it may have had alot to do with how spread out the network is. As they said unlike Napster there are no centralized servers, it is easy to lose contact.
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
This is an endemic situation with ALL friggin web content.
If you use search engines which don't check the accuracy of the data they scrounge or run your own with Archie/Veronica types of searches or worse, become your own search engine, snooping on everybody's hard drives, you're going to take longer and longer to retrieve indexes to content that is of more and more dubious quality.
The world NEEDS MP3.com types of businesses that rate & index as well as store content.
The world NEEDS engines that can demand micro-payment from the recipient before sending a file.
The world NEEDS micro payment services like X3.com to catch the pennies and send the content producers their due.
And SCREW the RIAA, MPAA and other Luddites and SCREW the culture vultures who rip off the concent creators (artists and writers etc.) and rip off the consumers by over charging simply because they put themselves in everybody's faces.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
There is a way to start resolving this problem, and it is currently in development.
e &folderId=136401&pageId=177268&JServSess ionId=3fe61b505308701b.415222.969643886549
The gPulp project is currently working on all of these issues. Check proposals and ideas at: http://gnutellang.we go.com/go/wego.pages.page?groupId=133015&view=pag
There is also a server oriented gnutella application which aims to start resolving some of these issues in the near term. Features such as:
1) Provide a server for broadband / dedicated network users to provide content with a true server oriented gnutella node. This will be similar to a modified apache for singular installations, or a federated distributed server architecture for routing and caching fun.
2) Remove broadcast push requests (in all future clients)
3) Proxy and cache support for slow users. This will allow beafy servers to take over some of the load which dialup / slower clients experience. This will be somewhat ala freenet, as popular data will propagate through caches in various nodes. Also, this can provide a level of anonymity which is not present.
4) Adaptive servers which configure their network connections for optimal efficiency. Not too busy, not too slow, and with the widest distance topologically from their peers (if linked) and fuzzy / reactive propogation algorithms so that TTL's and routes can be dynamically modified as load increases or other factors require.
There is nothing fundamentally flawed with the gnutella architecture, and it is far from a 'dead' horse'. However, there are significant innefficiencies and complications which are causing problems right now. Rest assured these will be fixed.
The basic problem is that small sites either take a lot of search hits to which they will answer "no find", or their index has to be mirrored elsewhere, which introduces centralization. There's an economy of scale to searching.
So automatic, distributed, redundant, partial centralization is necessary. This is hard. It also has to be reasonably secure against hacking; look at the problems IRC has. It probably needs a reputation service, so people who spam the indexing system lose.
On the other hand, music interest, being a popularity thing, follows a power law; the music most likely to be searched for will be found easily. A simple hack on Gnutella so that it queries servers slowly, in order, starting at the one with the best response time, stopping with the first find, will keep the thing from collapsing until somebody cracks the hard problems. It's not necessary to crack the general distributed search-engine problem to fix this.
Well, actually it's the problem with all server-less architectures. Is you have to have searches you've got to have server. If you want to make it P2P classic -- make the server invisible. One way is to create distributed server. More on this here.
I can't understand why this is news to anyone. Those of us who spend time thinking about these things said it right away when Gnutella was released, and we had discussed and rejected the broadcast model for routing several times before that (see the Freenet development list archives if you don't believe me).
The Math behind it is simple:
- Every user that that adds Cu amount of capacity to the network (on average).
- Every user also adds Tu amount of traffic (also on average). However, because of the broadcast nature that traffic is sent to all users, so with N users, each user generates Tu*N amount of traffic.
This means that the total capacity of the network is:
C = Cu*N
(Capacity per user times the number of users). The total traffic on the other hand is:
T = Tu * N * N = Tu * N^2.
For the network to work C needs to be greater than T, if T C. You simple cannot win using a broadcat model.
On the Freenet-dev list we have a standing rule that two words are indecent and offensive: "centralize" and "broadcast". We think we can pull it off without them, but it makes everything 1000% more difficult, which is the simple answer to why Freenet is developing more slowly then the one hundred million Napster and Gnutella variants outthere. That, and the fact that you are not helping us...
Total nitpick, but the function described in this example is not exponential, it is a basic parabolic polynomial: y=.5x^2-.5x. In fact, each unit change in the x variable produces a increasingly smaller incremental change (percent-wise) in the y variable. For this function to be exponential the function should look something like y=2^x. In any case, unless I misunderstand Gnutella, the problem is not that each peer is connected directly to each other peer but that the network is made up of subnetworks which get choked off when one subnetwork is connected to another subnetwork via a connection which is too small (i.e. 56K modem). This is the same kind of problem one has when using a typical star schema and one attempts to make too many joins for the (i.e. the data is a little too normalized). In order to only have one connection, you would have to arrange this in a client-server fashion, which would defeat the whole purpose of decentralizing the search function. The internet itself is a star schema which works fairly well, but only because nobody puts a 56K modem as a router in between two T3s-- which according to the article is the problem with Gnutella right now.
I do not have a signature
Napster isn't scalable. Why do you think they have separate, non-connected servers?
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I am the dot in slashdot.org
Executive ability is deciding quickly and getting someone else to do the work. --John G. Pollard
Why doesn't it show up on SourceForgery now? You don't have to let anyone else work on it until you are finished, and the CVS repository is a great way to make backups. (-as well as perform version control, duh).
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I am the dot in slashdot.org
There will have to be an exchange rate, because the taxman will have his due. Some exchange rate will have to be declared, and it will be your responsibility to submit taxes to the relevant state and federal authorities.
No different from the fact that you are supposed to submit tax from out-of-state mail order purchases directly to your state, and no different from the taxes levied on barter economies like the many community-issued currencies like IthacaHours: http://www.ithacahours.org
Note if you barter goods you are also responsible for the relevant taxes, for instancing if you "swap" cars.
Well, if mojo isn't cash, why does it need to be taxed? It's more of a barter system; I don't think there's tax on that.
I would have to agree with this. Gnutella is more the protocol then anything else. It is as way of sharing files. There are many modifications to Gnutella out that that use a different set of servers. ABMNet is an example of one. It's popular amoungst newsgroupies.
ABMnet is a modification for mostly videos/multimedia. (I use it to snag Dr Who videos). It's much better then just using gnutella for a few reasons. There are less users and they all share similar interests in what files are shared. Less users also mean less queries, and so the servers don't get bogged down.
By using gnutella in such a way to tailor to individual market needs, it can be much better then napster could ever be. If there were a set of gnutella servers just for a particular style of music, the searches would be faster and performance be much better for the users and the servers.
If you look at it from this point of view, you can't really extend napster too easily (although it has been done with things like napigator).
Remember my message of a few days back about how I wasn't helping because it's written in Java? Well, I got spanked for that (and I've gotten spanked re: other anti-Java postings) so I downloaded Kaffe last night. I'll be doing some ramp-up on Java for a while and if my negative view of Java melts away I'll pitch in with FreeNet.
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Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
Linux MAPI Server!
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(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
So I don't think Gnutella is going down in flames. Since it is open source, we may take that as a lesson learnt and perhaps rip out the offended non-scalable part and build a better file sharing device that actually works this time.
ZDNet has reported that Microsoft's peer to peer NetBUIE network does not scale as well as Microsoft NetBIOS over TCP/IP network.
ZDNET has also reported that when you are setting up a network of more than 10 computers using Microsoft NetBIOS networking, you may wish to consider a client-server network as opposed to a peer-to-peer network.
And after this commercial break, we report on the latest findings about using coaxial cable for network wiring.
Like, duh!
Gnutella was a good idea; it was just taken the wrong way by the moronic serverops who can't avoid sticking a ruler between their legs. Personally, I'd prefer having separate servers for content (mp3 specific network, DivX specific network, binary specific network, etc.).
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
I've always thought of gnutella as more of a demonstration than a finished product. While it may not be the best implimentation it shows that distributed file sharing can work well with no central server...its an important step...this version of gnutella may have reached its limit...but there will be more...just some thoughts
My Home: Apartment6
In the article they point out that the load could be cut in half by fixing some bad code.
They further mention that proposals for redesigned version have already been made.
link from article
Not only that, it says support and resources for this project are being sought out - it's active, it's open source, what more do we want?
Given the interest in Gnutella, I don't see any problem finding people to fix known bugs.
Rather then seeing this as the death of Gnutella, I saw it more as a positive article pointing out known bugs that are being fixed, and announcing a the planning of a new and even more powerful version.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
More caching could also help -- a machine might not have a particular item, but it may remember that it recently saw the item. So queries for popular items would quickly encounter a cache entry and be directed to a source. That could be done by having responses be noticed by both the requester and to the machine which passed the query onward -- if there is an "upstream", the popular results would float upward.
Ah, I forgot to mention that one, slow and buggy. I think this has more to do with the terrible Java implementation under FreeBSD though (like Java ICQ).
I read the internet for the articles.
It's stupid. The architecture of Gnutella is what's broken, not the code which implements it. A true peer to peer network is inherently limited.
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Another thing came to mind: Metcalf's law. The power over the Internet is equal to 2 to the power of the number of nodes who are actually on the 'net. If you look at the graph of that, it's exponential. I figure in Gnutella's case, it's power would be inversely proportional to the graph. Any comments?
I used to think Gnutella was great. It had speedy searches and was pretty fast. But now it just sucks. It's not so much that searches take forever now, it's that the searches return so much shit with them. Ads for webpages, viruses, things that don't even pertain to what you were searching for.
Gnutella needs a replacement and doesn't need to continually get a facelift that makes it look nicer.
-Frijoles-
Everytime i've tried gnutella i've managed to find nothing in comparision to napster (even wrapster) i've actually tried just randomly downloading things on gnutella i.e. 60k (goatsex) files and just get timed out. I've heard it was much more usable in the summer however. The only upside of the current version of gnutella is that its highly entertaining watching the stream of searches coming in :)
Its been mentioned before but some ways of fixing the situation may include doing things like making the searches bandwidth related to filter out the modems. Perhaps a better idea would be to have an auto peer mode where high bandwidth connections become servers for a cluster of machines near them. (Gaining mojo points to take the mojo example for instance) Then clients can just search the (relatively) finite connection of high bandwidth high speed servers much like in the form of napster but the client/server analogy is a bit more fluid..
Offtopic?
You americans really don't get sarcasm/irony, do you.
Maybe it could be a checkbox in preferences "I understand sarcasm and will moderate accordingly".
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
So where is it? Other than a group of equestrians that like Arabians, and the Anything But Microsoft Net parody of ZDNet, Google dosen't show anything.
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Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
It uses centrialized content tracking servers, but anyone can run one by just clicking a switch in their client. The content trackers store XML metadata describing the file, so you can search on different fields in different file type categories (easily defineable).
The the files themselves are broken into small redundant pieces and spread over the network. You only need half of the available pieces to reconstruct the original file. This way the system is resistant to servers disappearing. It also means you distribute your load over many hosts and clients with slower connections can still provide block services.
The coolest thing is that Mojo Nation has a built in digital cash called "Mojo" and a microcredit system that effectively turns it into a barter system for disk space, bandwidth, and CPU. Whenever you upload, download, search, or otherwise consume another systems resources, you must compensate them with Mojo. The Mojo represents the disk space, CPU, and bandwidth you are using. You can get Mojo by contributing your resources to the network through the client software (it's automagic). This way nobody can consume more resources than they are contributing to the system. Each person that uses it helps to make it stronger. Of course, being a real digital cash system, nothing stops people from sending Mojo to eachother in e-mail and settling the transaction with something like PayPal.
It's really cool, check it out.
Burris
Some of these problems could be easily solved.
I think there needs to be a way to tell what the network load on an individual node is, and attempt to negotiate connections with machines of similar connection speeds or ping times up to a maximum load cut-off.
Of course, there will still be people with hacked clients that report a bandwidth of 0 and a load of 10, but suspiciously have low pings. Those leeches should be killed, or at least swamped with connections...
Also, it would be nice if the network could re-organize over time, as in, promote people in your segment who give you back successful searches, and cut off branches that don't yield search results. Then everyone who wants free books would eventually find each other, and be separate from everyone who wants free porn (the other 99%, it seems)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Peer-to-peer searching was just a bad design. It doesn't make any sense to have to hit thousands of different nodes with each search. Of course there'd be a backup! What's lacking with Open Source developers is a basic understanding of data and databases. The two existing databases are sad compared to Oracle and DB2. Until some database expertise (usually, older, experienced developers) comes in the the Open Source arena, bad data designs like the one in Gnutella is going to continue.