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Gnutella's Challenge
Gnutella News sent in an excerpt from a clip2 DSS report about gnutella's evolution and condition. "the network has neither smoothly scaled nor catastrophically collapsed since average traffic grew to regularly exceed dial-up modem bandwidth in August 2000. Instead, the network persists in a fragmented state comprised of numerous continuously evolving responsive segments, the largest of which typically contains hundreds of hosts. We estimate at present that unique Gnutella users per day number no less than 10,000 and may range as high as 30,000. We suggest that further technical innovation and wide adoption of this innovation are necessary for the Gnutella network to scale beyond its present state."" Read this if you're interested in p2p [?] .
...as Richard Stallman would say.
There's nothing inherently unscalable about P2P, it's just Gnutella's broadcast searching that doesn't scale. Freenet should scale quite nicely--the network loosely sorts files by key across machines, so you can have a linear search that homes in on a machine holding the file, instead of broadcasting the search to everyone.
There's this nifty new spiffariffic thing, you might have heard of it. FTP. try going to oth.net and searching for your music. have an ftp client onhand. -facilis decensus averno
The whole deal about Mojo Nation is bartering for resources, not data. When you contribute to the system, you are contributing resources and services. It actually costs Mojo to publish data and make it available to others, since that is draining some resources from the system. However, the downloaders pay their own way, resource wise, when downloading, so you are not saddled with that cost (unlike other systems, where you pay in your own resources for every download from you!). A goal is a system where even the most popular content can be distributed for little cost to the publisher, but also works for storing data that isn't wildly popular.
With MN, every file automatically gets redundancy and you don't have run your own server keep data in the system. You could even just pay out more Mojo to make sure your blocks stick around. You can't do that with a Napster-like system.
So Mojo Nation isn't just a "file sharing" program, it's a distributed filesystem built on top of a market for computing resources (especially bandwidth).
Bandwidth Limited Connections. When two gnutella clients connect they should send in the reply the allocated bandwidth for that connection. The forwarding protocol should not allow more queries to be sent than the bandwidth allows. This would require a form of russian roulette on the packets--a method of killing queries.
It is feasable that the client should be able to forward post and response packets. Query packets are the most likely target for such filters. The filters could be implemented in several manners:
- The choosing is totally random.
- An artificialy intelligent option that learns the requests that have been handled and which have not would allow filtering of requests where the files are more readily available.
- An filtering option that may be unpopular with script kiddies (in fact, probably riled as sensorship), but popular with older or more mature individuals would perhaps place killfilters on obscene queries that enter your computer. After all, there is no reason that someone who doesn't agree with some actions must facilitate them with his/her own computer.
I would like to see the analysis of the different queries sent over the network, and some kind of user connectivity.Packet filtering would help to solve the current protocol limitation. Since the network is totally connected it would change the dynamics of the gnutella network and make it a more connected place even though there is a higher probability that the queries are never answered.
Gnutella network traffic exceeds bandwidth capabilities of dial-up users? Drop them. You can't take the heat, get out. Wanna play with the big boys, pay up.
I'm running Napster, and there's nothing more annoying that downloading from a 56k source, or waiting for a 56 guy to finish. 56k people (for this very same reason in fact) also don't like sharing any files. They can't. Any additional traffic will drive their leeching speeds to the floor.
That's what they are, leeches. Because they can't share and contribute constructively to the network. Napster keeps a central database, which frees up dial-up users from handling network messages, so they're still tolerable on that service. But on Gnutella there's no place for anyone running 56k or less.
I for one won't feel sorry about this development. A good portion of users will drop off, but they're just users, no matter how much thet want they can't be servers.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
And more to the point, if your definition rules out one of the top three peer to peer systems, that would seem to suggest to me that you need a better definition!
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One downside to swarm delivery systems is that data is "published", simple sharing of a common filebase (a la Napster and Gnutella) is not possible. Someone has to upload the pieces to the system in the first place for them to be available because the system does not do the "let me take a look through your hard disk for things to give to others" kind of file sharing found in other P2P systems. jim
Gnutella, being a real P2P applicaation, will suffer from scalability problems that a server-based system like Napster can work around. If Napster gets too popular, they can always add fatter pipes and bigger servers. But Gnutella is bandwidth-constrained since there is no central server farm tracking all the users.
The exchanges in Napster themselves may in fact be peer-to-peer, but we need to remember that they have big honking servers arbitrating the connections.
Gnutella's design is terrific (and a great hack), but unless they can re-jigger things to knock the slow connections down in priority (or some comparable solution), they're doomed to be a victim of their own success. I guess the other possibility would be for a minimum bandwidth requirement for the software to enforce. Perhaps some enterprising person will write a Gnutella that only allows, say, 144 Kbps and up connections on the network.
It would be interesting, though cruel, to relegate all the dialup people to second-class citizen status, but it would allow Gnutella to scale a lot past the existing limits.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
bah, rapidprototyping on a software product that was NEVER originally intended for how it is being used today. Nor was Napster I know, but they are making money on it.
;)
It is a known fact that taking a step back in the development process can take a HUGE hit on development time. Who the hell wants to do that w/a product that has no intent to be released as an important project in the first place?
/me is sticking to IRC
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then why is it that I'm always on the same network fragment as that idiot spammer who returns your search request with an html extension but containing a stupid advertizement?
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Let Gnutella split into multiple networks. It worked for IRC, it will work here, and it will work for similar problems in the future. Any problem that doesn't lend itself well to subdivision is probably badly specified. Don't forget that the Internet is a network of networks, and it works well for a reason.
Yes, the Internet works for a reason, and that reason is that I can inject my TCP/IP packet into it and any point and reasonably expect it to reach any other point.
This is why IRC is less popular than, say, AIM or ICQ, and always will be.
The Internet is the opposite of subdivision; if subdivision were the right approach, we'd all be using BBSes again, and even Fidonet wouldn't exist.
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Er, last time /I/ checked, if I were running AIM and ICQ /on the same box/ I still couldn't talk to myself.
This tells me you missed my point; with AIM you can talk to all AIM users, not just Efnet AIM users or Dalnet AIM users or etc.
(Or to more than one person simultaneously.)
This tells me you don't know how to use AIM or ICQ.
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Maybe I'm just an idiot but it seems to me that the easiest way to solve this problem is to have two flavors of Gnutella. A server flavor and a client flavor. The client is pretty much just what the napster program is - dump app that simply finds a server and submits queries but does no real work except to maintain a list of what it provides. The server program should be what Gnutella is, a peer-to-peer system that maintains a loose association of machines with record of where all the data on the network lies, including all the clients.
This would facilitate a hybrid network with servers run by anybody that chooses to run one, in any country, so it is safe to say that the servers cannot be shut down by an authority, especially since anyone can just set up another and join it to the network. This way we only have the server-machines communicating so it reduces the load on the network and brings gnutella's problems back to a manageable level. The client machines simply find themselves a server and then figure out where best to link to the network and go from there.
Seems that gnutella's problem is that it is too distributed. Granted, a p2p system can idealistically work, but I don't think we have the bandwidth for it. If the network was more static than it is it would also work but since it is ever changing it makes it much harder to track everything.
So, has anyone ever tried anything like this before? Did it work? If not can those problems be solved? Any networking gurus out there care to take a shot at this? It can't be a new idea, it's just too obvious.
Hell is being intelligent in a world full of idiots.
No, it's not at all like the internet and it's hardly "rapidly" evolving.
Gotta love rhetoric. Free the "people" from the tyranny of the admins! Gimme a break. I'm not nearly that old. What I haven't, and never will get over, are the fundamentals of success. Perhaps YOU are the one that is out of touch with reality? Afterall, empirically speaking, GNUtella hardly works for anyone.
You can propose all these theoretical means by which GNUtella can "fix" itself, but it's simply not reality yet. Furthermore, a great many of these theories at least require a significant change in the code base. So please, watch your tongue.
I never said GNUtella is just for warez/mp3/porn. What I said, if you care to read, is that GNUtella's real value is for IRC-type people (i.e., _groups_ people that know each other online and are somewhat technically competent) for getting warez/mp3/porn.
No where did I imply that this was somehow "evil". Though I do have some reservations about outright piracy, I simply never even hinted at it in this post. You, obviously, know as well as I do, that this is where the bulk of the bandwidth on these so-called p2p services go. It's a relevant fact. Deal with it.
GNUtella may be an interesting idea, but it's nothing more than a hack. Splitting into subnetworks is both infeasible and undesirable. First, you really can't compare it to IRC. IRC is highly centralized, whereas everything about GNUtella is distributed. IRC can, and does, scale for many thousands of users effectively; GNUtella does not (it responds like crap with any significant number of users) Secondly, you're thinking of the term "network" too rigidly. There is no network admin, no physical location, no centralization. In short, it's a ragtag and volatile collection of different IP addresses. There isn't a way to rigidly enforce the number of users in GNUtella, so how does one keep the networks divided into neat little units. This also means that it's hard to return to a specific network amongst a number of others. Where might your hotlist users be? Where do you find those with like interests when everything is constantly tossing and turning? Finally, and most importantly, you underestimate the importance of size. When the network can only effectively scale to ~5k users (probably a stretch), and when only one in 10 of those users has broadband that can support a decent number of speedy transfers (especially important when users tend to sign off and on while you're downloading), and when only one in 10 of those users has a sizable collection being shared (seems like most users have the same top pop garbage that everyone else has), you're ultimately reduced to, say, 50 users that you'd actually want to search from. I don't know about you, but 50 users isn't nearly enough. Now you might argue that i'm pulling these numbers out of my ass (and you'd be mostly right), but if you look at the empirical results, it's not far off the mark.
In my opinion, the only thing that something as trivial as GNUtella is good for, ironically, is the IRC types. Who could form psuedo-private loose knit "networks" from which they can share warez/mp3/porn with their "friends" without the need for a dependable server (i.e., just join the channel find an IP and connect to it)
I've had better luck. I'm not saying it's the best system in the world, but I downloaded at least 10 songs over 2 Mb last week. Most were crap (artist's fault, not Gnutella) but I got them.
Of course, you could expedite the whole thing by searching for stuff that describes you even if you'll never download it.
I was thinking clients like this could integrate into the current network by using a specially formatted search term right when they first connect -- a properly formatted reply would mean "connect to me instead, I'm neighborhood-aware too".
Have clients keep some keywords about the user. It could be a user-written paragraph, the names of shared files, recent search requests, etc. Clients would also have a "horizon" H: clients within H hops are considered "local". Clients can query other local clients for their keywords, and determine how similar those keywords are to their own (maybe a percent).
Define a "crawl" to be dropping one (low-keyword-match) direct connection and forming a new direct connection to a local node. You might decrease search response times by crawling repeatedly toward higher keyword-matching nodes.
Imagine a "speed" setting, measured in crawls per minute. There could also be a "randomness" setting, to misrepresent percent-keyword-match by a random amount for each local node. These settings could decrease over time, so you gradually lock in to a suitable local community without getting caught at the nearest local maximum. This idea is borrowed from simulated annealing, which someone else here probably understands better than I.
Is it possible to integrate such clients into the existing network, through search and search-response packets with a ttl of H?
Your horizon defines a neighborhood of local nodes. Their shared files will likely be of interest to you, so your client software might list them. In addition, their _ideas_ might be of interest, so your client software could show you their keywords, and allow instant messaging. There could even be a local neighborhood chat, ignoring chat packets with (hops > H), and sending packets with (ttl = H).
Usage scenario: I heard a band on the radio; sounded kinda like some other bands A B and C; and the lyrics had something to do with X, although I don't think they used that word. I make sure to put A B and C in my keywords, push up the speed and randomness sliders, and wait for them to settle down. Then I start asking in the chat if anyone knows about .... Maybe someone helps me out, and puts up a sample mp3. I might even ask if there are other bands like that.
Current Napster/Gnutella/whatever software lets you find songs you've heard of by bands you've heard of. Gnutella neighborhoods could let you find music you've never heard of.
So; here's the rub: What's the best way to get people to buy into this? With snow just setting in here in Buffalo I have a lot of coding time; what's the best codebase to start from? Who should I convince? (and of course, what am I missing and how could this idea be made better?)
Thanks for reading this whole long thang.
Chris
The network would probably route around it anyway. There are two types of routing going on in GNet. One is query routing... each query is sent down every link in the net. And there is response routing... each query response is sent over the same path the original query took.
Let's look at query routing. With each node connecting to ~4 or more others, it's a pretty well connected graph. If a query doesn't get through one way, it will probably get through another way. End users wouldn't really see much of a difference because of this connectedness.
For instance, if there's a 1 in 10 chance that a packet is dropped at a given node instead of relayed, and each node is connected to 4 others, that's a very small chance that it will never make it through.
Responses, on the other hand will have to be sent using the current protocol, or at least have a negligible chance of being dropped (i.e. drop all queries before dropping a response). Perhaps one day there will be a reroute protocol that can get a response back over a different path. Something to think about...
At any rate, I don't you'd see any more repeat queries if they occassionally get dropped than you do otherwise.
I like to play children's songs in minor keys.
"We're all sons of bitches now." --J. Robert Oppenheimer
I'd have to agree. I've found Gnutella to be practically useless for months now. Ah well, it wasn't bad when it started...
Nuf said. Think up, not down.
Is it me, or does Gnutella's Challenge sound like one of the games available on the WOPR in WarGames? I think it was between Falkan's Maze and Global Thermonuclear War.
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Most of your suggestions sound pretty close to what Freenet does. Or at least what it will do when it's finished.
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
It's already been done :)
- Al
I agree completely. It was not my intent to imply that P2P is uselss, merely that it's a poor fit for problems where scalability is a major design issue. "Hybrid vigor" is a very real phenomenon in computing.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
This is a bandwagon that just won't roll very far, and the reason - as usual - is obvious to people who've studied the field for a while. Naively implemented, a P2P protocol tends to generate O(n^2) messages for a given workload, where N is the number of nodes. This can often be brought down to O(n) but only with absolutely top-notch developers and a lot of effort. Better than O(n) is usually impossible.
By contrast, hierarchical systems tend to hover between O(n) and O(log(n)) depending on the particular problem. This does not necessarily apply only to single-rooted hierarchies, either. A multi-rooted hierarchy tends to exhibit the same scaling behavior, though of course the more roots you have the more you start to look like P2P and share its scaling characteristics.
The long and the short of it is that P2P just doesn't scale well. Even the best-implemented P2P protocol can merely approach the message efficiency of a naively implemented hierarchical protocol. For large numbers of nodes this results in the P2P implementation simply getting swamped. The only question is how large and how swamped it has to be before it becomes unusable.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
I've ported gtk-gnutella to darwin. Here is the link.
Darwin Gnutella
Regards,
proclus
What people recommend as a 'good' Linux Gnutella client. I use gtk_gnutella latest version (0.54?) and its startup time is horrible. It spends so much time in reading 'cached hosts file'. Also it is a bit high on CPU usage.
Any suggestions?
LL
Sure I'd probably run it up and leave it going on a cable line for a while but will this affect the benefits that the reflector would bring to other users and how much is it likely to detract from my network usage?
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
Er, last time /I/ checked, if I were running AIM and ICQ /on the same box/ I still couldn't talk to myself. (Or to more than one person simultaneously.)
-_QUinn
Reality Maintenance Group, Silver City Construction Co., Ltd.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
So make the client on the other end provide the information and have the sending client limit the bandwidth. It's still possible to modify, but it's much easier to modify your OWN nefarious client for evil purposes than it is to modify someone else's.
It might have something to do with bandwidth, for example in the UK most users are on dial ups, whereas in Germany ISDN is widespread, Germany is also ahead in terms of DSL deployment, would you be more likely to use Gnutella with 56K dial up connection or 128K ISDN or 768K DSL? I've tried Gnutella using a modem that refuses to connect at more than 33K on my line and the connect gets swamped, when I use my ADSL (I was a trialist for BT here in the UK for the last 2 years) its much more usable. I think you'll find that the countries with high speed cheap access via cable or DSL will always come up higher on usage stats for p2p products just because of the bandwidth.
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
Is that it does chop up the files and distribute them.How many people and I'm not talking about freedom loving geeks here really want to be having 1/4 of some data that they cannot access themselves on their HD? Yes I know there is the concept of getting paid the Mojo for doing that, but do you really think that your average user is going to concern themselves with that? Surely it would be easier and more "user freindly" to have the software recognise when there are multiple copies of the same data (e.g. using an MD5 hash of the file) and pull off the data from different machines with offsets so you might pull half from one machine and half from another if there are two machines with the same data. That way the users have the data, and know they have it, and at the same time you share the bandwidth out and if one machine goes down you pull the remaining data off another so you have the redundancy.
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
all you do is have a option under preferences ala napster that says your bandwidth type ie. 56k/cable/dsl/t1/t3/etc then whenever you connect to another T1 have it make a strong connection between the two of you. Its network matchmaking. To prevent people from specifying a lower bandwidth than you have, have the program limit your download bandwith to that specific speed which should keep people honest while helping to better organize the network.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
> sleazy (gnet2.ath.cx has the exact same TLD as another website whose URL contains the word "goat";
cx is a country TLD. Why should you call the whole of Christmas Island sleasy because of one goat who lives there?
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Ummm, no. Scalability is always a problem in any network programs but especially so with p2p programs. Like the internet, gnutella has to exchange information about itself and others and eventually most of the information exchange becomes uselss information (redundant) and progress of query will be impeded by sheer number of messages. Look at internet right now - even though it is not collapsing, the main problem is the usless BCP packets are overwelming the network. So in all, gnutella does have a big scaling problem and no internet doesn't work too well (think reliability and scalability).
I think when the average Query Bandwith reaches dial-up, the Gnutella will collapse. The current average includes actual file serving. When the querries reach dial-up speeds, the network will be unscalable.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Actually, MojoNation does something very similar to what you propose.. its still a beta product, and it's still growing, but it looks good so far:
... 56k clients could connect and ask the "net" of super nodes for the queries on content..
* Automatic mirroring nodes
Mojonation block-servers remember what blocks seem to be popular (most requested), and if they dont have them, they may go grab a copy to mirror locally.
Nodes would automatically mirror data from local (fast) mirrors, so that it's more accessible.
See above. Data that is popular is automatically mirrored. When data is published to the network, dual-redundancy is used to avoid losing the data if some blocks turn up missing. Think RAID. Well, no, not exactly, but it is somewhat redundant.
It's called a content tracker, and anyone can run one on Mojonation. There are two central "master publication trackers" (MPT's) that keep lists of all publication servers, and the clients retrieve this list initially from them. There are possible plans to distribute the MPT's as well.
Content Security
All of the content posted to the network would have meta-moderation on it; anyone can classify data, and mark it as such.
There is currently no 'rating system' in mojonation, but it is something being looked at, barring the technical hurdles in doing so.
Privacy
If possible, I'd like to see users IP addresses hidden; only have a unique login name/password setup for security; but this may make hackers/spammers hard to track and ban, but hopefully the meta-moderation would filter out most of it.
I'm not sure if Mojonation is going to go this route eventually, but if ya use TCP/ip, you can be traced eventually anyway. UDP is unreliable.. As for data privacy, Mojonation actually chops a file up into small blocks, then encrypts those blocks, and distributes them randomly. Then it send the description and block locations to the master server. In essence, nobody knows whats in each individual block on their server (if they run a storage server); everything is encrypted. I am breezing past all the details here, feel free to read more about it if you wish.
Volunteers
Anybody?
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mojo nat ion/
(Shameless plug): ProcessTree - Put your idletime to use.
With Germany at 20% and the UK at 4%, it seems that these numbers do not reflect the online population. Germany (~88M people) is bigger than the UK (~60M people), but not by that much. The main factor is probably just whatever has become popular with the internet community in the particular country. I am impressed though that 1 in 3 Gnutella hosts are non-US centric according to the article.
I haven't been able to successfully download files > 2 megs for over 3 months.
I hope this gets better with all this caching servers for gnutella in development.
Before you email me, remember: "There is no god!"
I had been using scour since gnutella started crapping out. but now that scour is shut down, i've been struggling to find a replacement p2p client. tried yo!nk, that barely works, n-tella dosne't seem to give me anything... anyone have any golden nuggets out there?
--DV
"Kermit the frog, cuz he gets all the hos!"
--DV
In this day it is safer to be a ninja than a samurai
In the Open Source P2P project I am working on, xS (http://xs.dasein.org), I have built in a pluggable network layer that literally enables the ability to add new protocols to the application on the fly. Thus, if the rest of xS rocks but the network protocol sucks, it is easy to write support for a new protocol!
that would be skillz
.oO0Oo.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
The article suggested using the clip2 Reflector Server (or is it servent) for dialups to connect to. An interesting way to propogate this further would be to restrict dialups to *only* be able to connect to reflector servers and also encourage the operation of the reflectors at node with a lot of bandwidth to spare.
This would also allow someone to develop a client that only allows peers of a certain bandwidth (say 144Kbps as was previously suggested) to connect to the network; then the dialups (and really slow DSL customers, sorry Verizon ;-)) could connect to reflector proxies. This would ensure that the network as a whole would remain low-latency and high bandwidth but that it would still be accessable to all.
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."
If Gnutella is going to succeed it needs to be more intelligent. Nodes shouldn't be hammered with search requests. Nodes need to be scored by their actual throughput of search data should be cached to make searches quicker.
Gnutella also needs anonymity and security features to prevent spyware from seeing what's going on, so it should be possible (though not mandatory) for a node to nominate a bunch of anonymizing servers that search and encrypted data packets ping-pong through before reaching their destination.
Apparantly BT has a really strong monopoly.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
What good is all that... well, a host could make decisions about which queries to route and which to discard based on any information about the reputation of the originator. Hosts would allow faster sends to downloaders with good reputation. Abusive hosts (Spammers, DoS attacks, etc) would ruin their reputation quickly (or keep recreating new keys all with no reputation).
Reputation in such a system would be very valuable. Somewhat like slashdot karma, it would appeal to many individuals, who would likely go out of their way to gain reputation signatures, perhaps by providing or mirroring lots of high quality files, attaching good meta-data descriptions to files, etc. The client software would need to have ways for everyone to do moderation on files and users... but unlike slashdot, there would be no universal score, only lots of keys/reputation scores, signed by other users. The software could also automatically detect certain behaviors (files available for download, on-line for long times) of other hosts, and issue reputation points. The idea is that a reputation score is to have a way to allocate the available resources (mainly bandwidth), to establish an incentive for users to share files and act in ways that benefit the network, and of course to make the network resiliant to abuse.
Now, for a system like this to scale, each host will need a LOT of disk space, to store a giant database of keys and signatures on them, and it would ultimately act like a giant cache. Each host would obviously collect the most positive signatures... the initial communication would be similar to boasting, the requester would send several of the best moderation signatures, hoping that the remote host already knows those people who signed and will therefore offer faster transfers, propagate a query farther, etc.
Maybe this ultimately works out to be the same as digital cash in MojoNation. I believe it is a different idea, in that it's based on an assumption of abundance.... everybody can win. You can get a great reputation without someone else giving up anything. In a cash system, when you get cash (mojo), someone else gives it up, and the overall philosophy is of scarcity.
If you have any ideas or thoughts to add to this, please post. Am I totally out in left field here, or does this seem like a reasonable idea?
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
It doesn't have to cover the entire Internet. The fact that you can simply specify a server to contact makes the solution so obvious that I can't believe people are still whining.
Let Gnutella split into multiple networks. It worked for IRC, it will work here, and it will work for similar problems in the future. Any problem that doesn't lend itself well to subdivision is probably badly specified. Don't forget that the Internet is a network of networks, and it works well for a reason.
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
The horizon for GNUTELLA should be about 5000 hosts. Currently they are getting a few tens or hundreds at most. That sounds like a collapse to me.
;-)
But that ISN'T because P2P is a bad idea, it is purely the bad, partly closed source, implementation and specifications of GNUTELLA.
There's no particular reason that horizons shouldn't still be 5000+. In fact even more than that, as the GNUTELLA protocol is quite bandwidth inefficient. It may be possible to more than double the number of hosts within the horizon by being more efficient.
e.g. nearly half of the current overhead is in the TCP packet headers. Sending bigger, less frequent messages would reduce the overhead percentage greatly and give much more "useful" throughput. (If you think Britney Spears is useful
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Users continue to query the network primarily for audio, video, image, and program files
Well, THAT just about covers EVERY file in EXISTENCE! Seriously, though, I thought that video and image would be in the vast majority. We all know that people would would waste their time with the seriously slow download speeds of Gnutella are probably the kind who don't get out much, and, well... you get the picture.
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
There should be a Subnet of Gnutella named ATMNet or ATHNet - Anyone ever heard of this? Would really like to hear more about it, but I can't find any information on the Internet.
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Find free books.
So is it surprising that we don't observe a lot of altruistic behavior from people with this kind of antisocial personality, linked together on an anonymous network, doing things that are illegal? Is it surprising that people who are too cheap to buy a Metallica CD are also too cheap to pay for cable modem, buy CDs, rip them, and put them on the network? Here we have a lot of people who think that information freedom is all about taking, and not about creating and giving back; is it surprising that gnutella is languishing at the 0.x stage?
If you want information to be free, make some free information. Start a garage band, and stop whining about the nonintuitive user interface in the gnutella software you downloaded for free.
--
Find free books.
Here is my 'proposed solution' - as everyone else has one, I thought I'd toss this idea out. Why not extend the Gnutella protocol to include a method to subdivide the existing network. Meaning - instead of randomly collecting other nodes of any type - why not only connect nodes of a certain type say "Warez" or "MP3Z". Now if I have 1.2.3.4-MP3 and I choose to connect to the "MP3" subnet of gnutella I will.
Clients Can query the larger 'unsegmented' net to determine the 'subnetted' network extensions:
5.6.7.8:warez;
9.0.1.2:pron;
3.4.5.6:warez;
ect.
This could probably be implemented without breaking the existing clients and network where only Gnutella 'v2' clients would be able to choose a subnet to join. When the "MP3Z" network grows to the breakpoint - someone starts a MP3ZZ network.
As a side note: Has an organization or project formed on any collective level to address these problems? Is there a 'recognized' authority that is guiding the 'official' Gnutella protocol and a reference implementation? Gnutella is a very necessary model to pursue and develop because of the threat to Napster (though OpenNap provides a mechanism to thwart the $RIAA$MPAA$ whores - there is still the problem of having 'servers' to identify and attack (not to mention the problem that Napigator will have when Napster is finally shut down...))
First, it's not centralized anymore than Gnutella is. The client is virtually identical. Second, Gnutella was intended to be a niche product. It was written for mp3's and "oh yeah, you can trade other stuff with it, too, I guess". Based on the report it is very arguable that all the non-mp3 trading is what is bogging down the network.
From your first post:
GNUtella may be an interesting idea, but it's nothing more than a hack.
There is a strong implication in your statement, reinforced elsewhere, that because Gnutella can't be everything for everybody it is useless and should be discarded. I have given you one concrete example of a use that fills a very real need, at least as far as users are concerned. Not only does it make one certain type of file sharing much easier, it also substantially increases efficiency by decreasing redundancy on already over-loaded news servers.
So, you're partly right. Gnutella isn't, and can't be, everything for everybody. It's not supposed to replace http, ftp, etc. It's simply a better means for one type of file transfer.
Why spend hours wandering acres of mall space looking for something when you can go right to the specialty store that has what you need? Or, to use another analogy, why throw away the allen wrenches just because most people use screws?
I still don't see anything wrong with splintering protocols if they serve genuine needs, and Gnutella is quickly and admirably growing into roles that it is suitable for.
When it comes to a system like Gnutella then the increasing fragmentation that has arisen due to bandwidth problems can only be a bad thing in the long run, because it means that what was originally a resource allowing you to search through a huge amount of material becomes much more limited, encouraging people to stop using it.
Consider a small Gnutella network of about 50 machines. What do you think is going to be on there? Considering most users are leeches who don't want to share their own files, chances are that most of the available content will be popular crap such as Brittany Spears or Metallica. There will only be a very limited selection of minority music, and this will mean that people get fed up pretty quickly.
But when you have a strong, centralised database or a large network then the amount of minority music will be corresponding larger, meaning that everybody has a wider selection of music, making it a more popular service. There's less temptation to give up on it in this case.
It's a general property of this kind of system - smaller, local networks just can't offer the benefits that a larger or more centralised network can in terms of content and diversity. And if Gnutella continues to fragment, it'll reach the point where there won't be any point in using it.
Jon Erikson, IT guru
Much as I love this software, There seems to be an emmbarrasing amount of pirated stuff. This is unfortunate. It has a lot of much more legitimate uses than this for legal free data. I fear that the software may be attacked by large corporations who consider it to be solely a piracy tool.
Over the space of the last six months the percentage of network content has dropped from 95% to now only 48.19%.
I think this percentage will drop even more in the next 6 months.
--
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Mainly what the issue is, is that the whole gnutella "protocol" was pushed too quickly into a "standard", so it can't be adapted to the changing environment that it has endured. Primarily because the people who created it can't touch it, and nobody else can really take a leadership role and be followed. So a proof of concept system stagnates and never really advances. Unfortunate, if you ask me, but hey, ultimately it won't matter. Poo on file sharing apps.
Personally, I think that there should be nag lines whenever you download something ('tis better to give than to receive, leeches can't suck blood forever, et cetera). The condonation of the leech society must stop. You pay taxes to support your home country, so why don't you set up a Gnutellanet server to support Gnutella?
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
As long as there's agreement between software developers, it could be changed. I'm sure that there's many people who have considered improving on Gnutella.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
I've been reading tidbits around the net, and I'd like to ask what people think about this:
a rd_of.mp3)
Automatic mirroring nodes
Nodes would automatically mirror data from local (fast) mirrors, so that it's more accessible. It would need to "learn" what files are requested, and then mirror them. What would stop the script kiddies from "rating" the content they want up, so it would be mirrored more often?
Structure
If all of the clients are required to keep a copy of the "whole database", it is not feasible without everyone on the network having a T3+, or later OC3+ connection. But as with the data, the nodes keep track of other nodes, but only if the bandwidth permits. 56k clients could connect and ask the "net" of super nodes for the queries on content. No one node should be in control; but many based on the same rule set. You would have to have a setting on the client for "perm super-node", or just "56k browser". Even the 56k browser could contribute to the network however; two 56k modems that are on the same segment of 'net can transmit with very low latency; they can buffer queries from the super nodes, and allow for faster access.
Content Security
All of the content posted to the network would have meta-moderation on it; anyone can classify data, and mark it as such. People can also rate classifcations; so to prevent some spam. If a file with the same name shows up on the 'net, it could end up with the same rating. (my_garage_band_called_nirvana_that_nobody_has_he
I'm sure that folks have a complex yet effect methods of rating. (flame wars may ensue) but I'd be really interested in hearing ideas.
Privacy
If possible, I'd like to see users IP addresses hidden; only have a unique login name/password setup for security; but this may make hackers/spammers hard to track and ban, but hopefully the meta-moderation would filter out most of it.
Volunteers
Anybody?
-Eric Johanson - ericj.spambad@cubesearch.com
This sig for rent
- Why is it the case that it is not possible to find mp3's on web pages (for which good search engines exist) while you can find them on napster or gnutella?
- Why do people talk about freeriding on gnutella and not on napster?
Someone had better think of a way to get Gnutella up and running at 100% efficiency soon or else nobody's going to be able to get free music online... except on IRC and that's no fun :)
I have a habit to support here... someone please help!
-Duke
I wonder why Germany ranks highest among the non-US users... Japan I can see and Canada is in North America but why Germany? Check out this graphic.
.net breakdown (remember that cool poster from ThinkGeek?) and the breakdown by .edu as well.
There are some cool charts examining the
-Duke
new: http://www.cutemx.com
-- Gone Crazy, Back Later
http://www.cutemx.com
-- Gone Crazy, Back Later
True P2P Can't Scale? Take a look at Freenet
Freenet is not actually P2P. It is a redundant global index similar in fashion to URLs.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
after having some issues with my isp about napster (basically, they banned it) I decided to give gnutella a try and downloaded a few clients to see what was best. My conclusion: They all suck. Every last one of them looks like it was written by a retarded monkey whose experience in development was reading "Learn VB in 21 days"..bugs galore, and interface that even I found confusing and of course, the fact that It Didnt Work. I did a search for a common MP3 (metallica) to see how many it would return..after 10 minutes and nothing (and no report that it was even still searching) I decided to uninstall the hunk of crap I had downloaded. Some things need to be done: Another protocol other than gnutella needs to be developed..why use that crutch? Make a better one. And write a DECENT CLIENT for the thing. Pity I dont have more time on my hands or I would...
-
It's quite simple actually. Instead of sending a query through your connected hosts, then through all of it's connected hosts, is to directly query all hosts in the database... Each client would create a database of it's connected hosts, and from each host it would download their databases, and combine them. Using the IP as the primary key will prevent any duplicates automatically.
When you search for the word "linux" your host will ping the first host in the host list, if the host is unpingable, it is removed from the database and the next is pinged. If it does reply to the ping, then you send the query to the host... It returns all the "linux" files it has and then says goodbye. Your client queries the next machine in the list and so on. This way you only need about the same ammount of bandwidth it takes to search a normal search engine like yahoo.com.
Queries will still take time for those on modems but at least it will work no matter how dense the network gets or how slow your connection is!
Feel free to email me with any insight/comments/questions about this.
What good is a product if the core is bad? Oh, it may look nice, such that any fool could use it, but if it barfs everytime you do something users will just walk away. And all because the development effort went in to the user interface and not the architecture.
Is there any reason it couldn't be a command line app? Probably not. Anyone remember archie for ftp searching? It was a tool that worked.
Hundreds of monkeys, eating bananas, swingin' away on ropes, with their brains hooked together with wireless broadband technology, all for the purpose of file sharing!
And before anyone gets a change to say it...
There... it's been said.
Thank-you, and good day!
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
One of the reasons that Gnutella flounders is the Interface. The creators had a novell idea of creating a node-based network for file sharing, but their interface needs some work.
Napster, and then Scour, both simplified their application so any nitwit (even some mac users using macster) could gain access to the resources.
A better interface as well as some way to have the top hosts from gnutellahosts.com automatically be used everytime the application is loaded up is definately a must.
What the developers need to do is try a rapid prototyping model . As much as I hated it while doing that damn internship, it really does work. People need to be surveyed on how the application should work. The only way to come up with a good product which cathes the broadest audience is to get feedback from that audience.
Thats enough bs from me.
If you pointed the gun at someone and found out it was your clone pointing a gun at you, think of what you would think.