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Mathematical Analysis of Gnutella

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the it-warrants-mentioning dept.

jrp2 sent in a paper written by one of Napster's founding engineers. It is a mathematical evaluation of Gnutella discussing why the network won't be able to scale up to any reasonable size. I have been impressed with Gnutella in the past, and have wondered along these same lines in the past.

1 of 332 comments (clear)

  1. The Logarithmic value of the messages exchanged ! by Khalid · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The problem is not that difficult, if you want Gnutella to scale, then you need to avoid the exponential explosition of the number of messages exchanged between the clients as their number grows. The only solution is to structure the network by using "super clients" or "servants" or "super nodes", call them what you want, the later is what KaZaa and Morphus have accomplished; this makes the number of messages exchanged grows in a logarithmic way (this is an outrageous simplification of course, but gives an idea). There are many such expriments with Gnutella two with those ideas, this is what BearShare is trying to do.