Mathematical Analysis of Gnutella

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.

Comments

This is old news.

[BitterOak]

This has been discussed since shortly after Gnutella came out. It is essentially arguing that if each peer asks several other peers if a song is available, you get an exponential growth of search requests and the network clogs if you have too many users. This was basically the rationale for the Fasttrack type of systems, such as Morpheus, which most people use today.

mathamatical evaluation

[Molina the Bofh]

It is a mathamatical evaluation of Gnutella

Someone has not passed his grammatical evaluations at school :)

Re:mathamatical evaluation

[Mr_Matt]

Yipes - you just flamed a guy who's nick includes the phrase "bofh." Hope you're not calling tech support for awhile...

madopal - "Hi, the printer's down again...can you fix it?"

sympathetic BOFH - "Sure thing...lemme see what the problem is...ah yes, it appears that your machine's /home directory was too full and causing resonant frequency interference with the lpr command...this should take care of it..."*clickety click*

madopal - "WTF are you blathering about?"

sBOFH - "Oh, nothing, nothing at all. Have a nice day!" *click*

*quick look*

boxen:/home/madopal> ls -l
total 0
boxen:/home/madopal>

madopal - "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!"


Me, I flame with a bit more care. Moron. :)

I need to know...

[cca93014]

Will this guy just quit with the numbers and tell me if I'll have the worlds collection of porn downloaded by lunchtime tomorrow? We need to know these things goddammit!.

Re:Hitchhiker's Guide, Part II.

[Phexro]

Earth: Mostly harmless.

you must have the new edition.

OT: Quick! Earn that Karma!

[Cheshire Cat]

Since numerous people above have pointed out this is a repeat, everyone should browse the older article and repost all the comments that were modded up to +5, and reap the benefits when that karma comes rollin' in! ;)

Scaling is not the issue

[Black Art]

Quality of files is the problem.

There are a number of problems using Gnutella.
Getting a complete and/or undamaged file is difficult. (Especially anything long.)

Just because you find a file does not meanyou can get it. Huge numbers of the files "available" on Gnutella are either on non-routable addresses or on servers that refuse connection or timeout.

Many of the files on Gnutella are misnamed or misattributed. Do a search on "Weird Al", for example. You will get all sorts of responses, few of them actually by Weird Al.

It is useless for getting files that contain multiple parts, unless tared or the like. (For example, getting a complete album is next to impossible. The unreliability of the service ensures that.)

Gnutella seems to have nothing to insure any sort of "quality of service" or file intergrity.

Pretty much a waste of time.

Re:This is well and truely FUD.

[Zog]

> This guy might know how to use Mathematica ...

I think you're underestimating the intelligence (or, should I say, raw thought power) such an accomplishment takes!

A quick illustration:

My physics professor graduated from MIT with a Ph.D. at the age of 23. He's worked with mathematica for ~2 years now (quite constantly - research on particle physics in plasmas), and hasn't yet been able to figure out any sense in which kind of brackets to use where. Yeah. Needless to say, when we have problems, we just guess until something comes out right ;)

Re:Hitchhiker's Guide, Part II.

[sharkey]

Maybe "partially lethal" would be more appropriate.

That's just the pretzels.