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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.
The numbers are all from early 2001. Napster has since been killed and reborn with an entirely different model, and gnutella (KaZaA et al) have exploded. What's the point of this report given the ancient data?
Given those changes wouldn't it be more valuable to see if their hypotheses and conclusions hold up with the new data?
Thanks,
--
Matt
Anyone else a big mutella fan? I always run it in a screen session, with the web interface enabled. I love that I can use the same session, from a terminal at home, ssh'ed in, over the web interface on my LAN, or through an https tunnel. Great piece of software, highly recommended.
This is a very old (in internet terms) report. Its results are taken from when gnutella and napster were two "popular" p2p architecuters (report refers to data gathering in May of 2001). Since then napster has died and been reborn in a new form and gnutella has adopted a 2-tier topology such as kazaa has. Companies such as clip2, who are long dead and buried, are referenced and bandwidth usage is stated from 2001 making the results useless and the references impossible to find.
I assume its an old report resubmitted by somebody who doesn't know better otherwise research like this is worse than useless because it provides completely inaccurate results.
Freenet network has been HORRIBLE lately, whereas you used to be able to download videos at quite a good speed, now it's nearly impossible to fetch 5k text documents.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Unfortunately, even with NGR, Freenet suffers from the fact that you can never be sure what is actually there and up-to-date.
You can start downloading a splitfile, it'll successfully start...and then half-way through (or even 90% through), decide that it can't find the rest of the blocks required. Retrying may help, or it may not. All the blocks might not even exist on the network any longer. Then again, Freenet's purpose is quite different compared to other P2P systems.
If Freenet sites were kept up-to-date a bit better (I think a lot of people gave up on it pre-NGR), it might remain more usable. Unfortunately, it's current state isn't that hot.
Y'all are missing the point, thanks once again to the many-headed beast that is the word "P2P".
In this case, the academics are strictly concerned with P2P as a network organization, with little regard to what apps are built on top of it. This has nothing to do with "Napster" or "Gnutella" as "file sharing systems". Instead, Napster and Gnutella are being studied by the academics because they are the only things you can get hard numbers for, because few-to-none of the academic P2P systems have been implemented on such a wide scale. They do not perfectly implement what the academics are studying but they are close enough to provide some data about how other systems might behave in the real world.
Academic P2P systems tend to concentrate on "pure" P2P, where there are no servers and ideally no "supernodes" (though they'll settle for dynamic organization that emerges from the protocol itself with no human intervention). This is a much different and much harder problem then "Let's share music!".
The closest to a wide-scale academic P2P system that has been actually deployed that I know of is Freenet; for ideological reasons (pure P2P, no servers) it shoots for the same goals that the academics shoot for for other reasons (mostly that pure P2P systems are hard enough to be interesting, whereas Napster's organization could be created by one teenager without much difficulty; no disrespect to Fanning but it's basically another varient of client-server). Note how much trouble it has had scaling up, just as Gnutella has had trouble; "pure P2P" is friggen' hard in the real world.
This is "old news" as a couple others have noted because of the peer review process, but to the academics this is valuable to have such peer-reviewed hard data, because you can model and simulate your network to your heart's content, but until you see it in the real world on a large scale you can't be sure it works. Without this kind of hard data they're adrift in a sea of pure theory.
This paper isn't for "you", so the fact that "you" don't understand what it's for or that "you" think this is useless is rather uninteresting. This paper is for academic P2P practicianers; if you don't know about academic P2P theory, you can ignore this safely. Academic P2P and what "you" think of as P2P are quite different.
(The "you" here is the "average Slashdot poster to this article. Apply it to yourself (or not) as appropriate.)
Note that in this paper "academic" is not used as a perjoritive; it's just that as I said, there's such a huge disconnect between academic and non-academic P2P goals that they hardly deserve to be lumped under the same name.
You admit to being responsible for installing spyware on thousands of people's computers?
I hope they catch you some day. You are no better than any other virus writer.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
This thing is plainly very outdated for Gnutella. Their conclusion recommendations include things like having various levels of responsibility for nodes.
If it were current, they'd at least have mentioned ULTRAPEERS or LEAF nodes! Gnutella currently DOES have nodes which 'volunteer' to carry more load.
In conclusion---it's really not worth reading anymore, because the designs they studied are dead and replaced already.
-Terr