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Napster and Gnutella Measurements
Posted by
Hemos
on Mon Nov 10, 2003 11:08 AM
from the measuring-the-impact dept.
from the measuring-the-impact dept.
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.
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For those of you who despise PDFs for simple text (Score:5, Informative)
You think that's bad... (Score:2, Funny)
I would like to ge
Re:For those of you who despise PDFs for simple te (Score:3, Funny)
And here's the text summary from the researcher:
Stop using P2P clients you fscking pirates, you're wasting all my pr0n bandwidth at the university.
HEY! (Score:1)
Way-y-y Out of Date (Score:5, Insightful)
Given those changes wouldn't it be more valuable to see if their hypotheses and conclusions hold up with the new data?
academia. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re:Way-y-y Out of Date (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
is it me or... (Score:4, Funny)
mutella (Score:3, Insightful)
Shame they didn't consider Freenet (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Shame they didn't consider Freenet (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Shame they didn't consider Freenet (Score:3, Funny)
"Download Freenet
Important note for first time users
When you first start Freenet your node will know very little about the network - it could take up to several minutes or longer to open a website. Keep trying, because the more you use Freenet, the faster it will get. "
Re:Shame they didn't consider Freenet (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Shame they didn't consider Freenet (Score:2)
I have, and it's not gone well.
Re:Shame they didn't consider Freenet (Score:1)
it was written this year,
but the reson to ignore freenet was
probly bassed of the fact that the
data the colected was from 2001.
Temporary Mirror (Score:5, Informative)
http://theory.cs.iitm.ernet.in/msj.txt
outdated (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:outdated (Score:2)
in fact, it's pretty useful comparision of the _techniques_ used(wouldn't matter if it's from year 1023 or from year 4034).
you just shouldn't treat as your usual "hottest gfx/cpu/mem/hd/usb-device" comparision.
.
Does anyone care? (Score:3, Funny)
ARGGGHHH!!!! (Score:1)
LOSING, LOSING, LOSING!
* AKAImBatman beats himself over the head with a wet mackerel.
I think Safari needs a grammar checker...
some useful stats, but outdated (Score:5, Informative)
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 [stanford.edu].
Please mod parent up (Score:1)
Re:Please mod parent up (Score:2)
Well, given that you've posted something like ten messages in this thread, I find your comment mildly comic.
Re:Please mod parent up (Score:1)
Re:Please mod parent up (Score:2)
Work?
Encrypted P2P ... (Score:4, Informative)
at:http://slashdot.org/articles/03/05/2
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
Re:Encrypted P2P ... (Score:2)
Re:Encrypted P2P ... (Score:2)
What it is really good for is as a mini-groupware application. You can be in a hostile environment (the internet) and your shared files and messages are relatively secure.
Re:Encrypted P2P ... (Score:1)
thx, Bigwavejas
Re:Encrypted P2P ... (Score:2)
current size of the gnutella network (Score:4, Informative)
Napster didn't return... the uncatchy name did (Score:1, Flamebait)
The Napster of today isn't NEARLY as fast due to the fact it's no longer a peer to peer system. It can't even begin to compete (bandwidth wise) with Gnutella. On a 56k modem I can get a song of of LimeWire (which partially uses the Gnutella network) in about 3 to 3.5 minutes. On Napster, it takes about 8 minutes. Neither is a problem with broadband.
That said, I could also
Re:Napster didn't return... the uncatchy name did (Score:2)
The name Napster didn't seem like a catchy name to begin with. It also got associated with "song theft" or "Geek/Techie rights fighters"
The Napster of today isn't NEARLY as fast due to the fact it's no longer a peer to peer system. It can't even begin to compete (bandwidth wise) with Gnutella. On a 56k modem I can get a song of of LimeWire (which partially uses the Gnutella network) in about 3 to 3.5 minutes. On Napster, it takes about 8 minutes. Neither is a problem with broadband.
BaH! (Score:5, Informative)
As a major developer of one of the world's leading Gnutella clients [bearshare.com] 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 [bearshare.com] some of my results. [bearshare.com]
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-
Re:BaH! (Score:2, Insightful)
I hope they catch you some day. You are no better than any other virus writer.
Reminds me of a quote... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm starting to get the sense that Science really should stick with the timeless concept. 2 years is a blink of an eye when preparing a paper on particle physics, or mathematics. 2 years is at least 8 lifetimes on the internet. By the time you write about it, it's obsolete.
How to know when not to RTFA (Score:2)
Re:How to know when not to RTFA (Score:2)
But go ahead and post a comment, 'cause this is slashdot after all.
--
Re:How to know when not to RTFA (Score:2)
Reminds me of the weather prediction system ... (Score:2)
The problem was that the process ran for 5 days, so if it started on Sunday, you could know what Monday's weather would be by the following Friday.
This study (and I do understand it takes time to pull together this kind of comprehensive usage data in an organized format) falls along the same lines. It would have bee
Conclusions (Score:4, Informative)
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.
newer data from the same authors (Score:1, Informative)
Measurement, Modeling, and Analysis of a Peer-to-Peer File-Sharing Workload at http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/gribble/papers/ p118-gummadi.pdf [washington.edu]
and
An Analysis of Internet Content Delivery Systems at http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/gribble/papers/ p2p_osdi.pdf [washington.edu]
Y'all are missing the point (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
ACM considered harmful. (Score:3, Flamebait)
Oops! (Score:2)
Re:ugh (Score:2)
Re:Ugh. (Score:1)
Re:Ugh. (Score:1, Troll)
Re:Ugh. (Score:1)
Re:Ugh. (Score:1)
Now after all of this chest thumping (which is even cuter as an AC) are you actually going to boycott Slashdot, or did you just want to join the masses of people that will complain about Slashdot without actually doing anything about it?