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Napster and Gnutella Measurements

belswick writes "UW has posted a paper titled "Measuring and Analyzing the Characteristics of Napster and Gnutella Hosts" at Washington in PDF form. Interesting reading for those who implement P2P software, with actual measurements, tools, and topologies. You 3l33t H4x0rz are ACM members, R1gh4?" You can get a cache of the PDF and view it online as well.

11 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. For those of you who despise PDFs for simple text by AKAImBatman · · Score: 4, Informative

    ...here's the HTML Version courtesy of Google.

  2. Shame they didn't consider Freenet by Sanity · · Score: 5, Informative

    Freenet's next-gen routing algorithm does detailed analysis of node performance and incorporates this into its routing decisions. In effect, Freenet already implements their proposal, neatly integrating it into the Freenet routing algorithm.

  3. Temporary Mirror by arvindn · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://theory.cs.iitm.ernet.in/msj.pdf
    http://theory.cs.iitm.ernet.in/msj.txt

  4. academia. by rebelcool · · Score: 4, Informative

    paper publishing takes a long time. gathering, analyzing data and making sure you're coming to proper conclusions takes lots and lots of research and double checking. And then theres peer review, which takes months as the paper gets submitted to academic peers who read and analyze and comment on it - when they've got the time.

    In any case, the data points themselves arent as relevant as the topology and structure of growth. doesn't matter if the data is from 2001, theres plenty to be learned from.

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    -

  5. Re:Way-y-y Out of Date by molarmass192 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Not to nitpick but Kazaa isn't based on Gnutella, it's based on FastTrack. They're both P2P but FastTrack is a closed system while Gnutella is an open one.

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    Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
  6. some useful stats, but outdated by Adam+Fisk · · Score: 5, Informative

    This study is based on extremely old data and is not particularly relevant for today's Gnutella. The Gnutella crawl data is from 2001, a time when Gnutella was a vastly different network with a completely different searching architecture. Gnutella at the time was a very young protocol. Since then, the search architecture has moved beyond the flooding model, now using a combination of distributed indexing and "dynamic querying." These techniques are specified in detail here.

    The data on average number of shared files and uptime is interesting, but there's really not a lot in here that is actually useful for peer to peer development. There's a lot of active, very useful research being done elsewhere. The folks at Stanford have done a great deal of work in this area, much of it very applicable. Their work is here.

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    Adam Fisk

  7. Encrypted P2P ... by bigwavejas · · Score: 4, Informative
    Slashdot ran an article a while back regarding, "a secure, distributed mesh-like networking protocal and platform called Waste." See article:
    at:http://slashdot.org/articles/03/05/29 /0140241.shtml?tid=126&tid=93

    I've been using the software to send files securely to trusted friends, I wonder if this isn't the direction sharing mp3s will go in the future, in order to avoid the RIAA.

    In any case... Nullsoft has since banned using the software, but its still available under the GPL at sites like:
    http://grazzy.mjoelkbar.net/waste/mirror/

    Snarf on!
    F the RIAA

    --
    "Simplify, simplify, simplify!" Thoreau
  8. current size of the gnutella network by smd4985 · · Score: 3, Informative

    can be found here.

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    smd4985
  9. BaH! by vDave420 · · Score: 5, Informative

    As a major developer of one of the world's leading Gnutella clients this data is old, untimely, and really not "new news" to anyone involved in Gnutella.

    Much of this data is based upon estimates & reported crawler (ha!) data.

    Want some real, hardcore data about Gnutella (or at least the BearShare portion of it)?

    I invented a revolutionary distributed stats system that is in place in the latest versions of BearShare. No more guessing about p2p network information, like transfer bandwidth, etc. Try checking out some of my results.

    This data is collected from the network, in a brand new, distributed, 'polled-not-crawled' scheme with remarkably fast turnaround times on data (new data points every 5 mins, on average).

    Much, if not all, of this in the above report information is actively being summarrized for Gnutella (again, the BearShare portion at least) and some early (non-automated graphing) of the results can be found in the above links.
    Expect (some of) this data (like node count, shared files/bytes, etc) to be available on our website (in real time) soon.

    Kinda interesting...
    In any case , story data is not novel any more, certainly not timely. =)

    I like my data collections much better.

    -dave-

    --
    The pig browse. With Google. Sigh is to the chicken. Chicken is fool. Giggle. The DailyWTF giggle.
  10. Conclusions by TuringTest · · Score: 3, Informative

    Thanks to the structure of scientific papers, you don't have to actually RTFA in order to know what is all about:

    5 Conclusions

    In this paper, we presented a measurement study performed
    over the population of peers that choose to participate in the
    Gnutella and Napster peer-to-peer file sharing systems. Our
    measurements captured the bottleneck bandwidth, latency,
    availability, and file sharing patterns of these peers.
    Several lessons emerged from the results of our measure-
    ments. First, there is a significant amount of heterogeneity in
    both Gnutella and Napster; bandwidth, latency, availability,
    and the degree of sharing vary between three and five orders
    of magnitude across the peers in the system. This implies that
    any similar peer-to-peer system must be very deliberate and
    careful about delegating responsibilities across peers. Second,
    even though these systems were designed with a symmetry of
    responsibilities in mind, there is clear evidence of client-like
    or server-like behavior in a significant fraction of systems'
    populations. Third, peers tend to deliberately misreport in-
    formation if there is an incentive to do so. Because effective
    delegation of responsibility depends on accurate information,
    this implies that future systems must either have built-in in-
    centives for peers to tell the truth or systems must be able to
    directly measure and verify reported information.

    --
    Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
  11. newer data from the same authors by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative
    Looks like these guys also have some data about FastTrack-based systems that is much more recent:

    Measurement, Modeling, and Analysis of a Peer-to-Peer File-Sharing Workload at http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/gribble/papers/ p118-gummadi.pdf

    and

    An Analysis of Internet Content Delivery Systems at http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/gribble/papers/ p2p_osdi.pdf