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.

Comments

Shame they didn't consider Freenet

[Sanity]

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.

Re:Way-y-y Out of Date

[molarmass192]

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.

some useful stats, but outdated

[Adam Fisk]

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.

BaH!

[vDave420]

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-