[p2p-hackers] Re: scalability

[Sam Berlin]

The protocol, as described nearly anywhere, isn't Gnutella.  Gnutella,
as others have said, really isn't a protocol (0.6 or any number)
anymore.  It's a hodgepodge of a lot of features, all implemented by
various Gnutella clients.  Partial file sharing has been in use by
mainstream clients for around 1-2 years.

As Greg mentioned, academic papers tend to describe Gnutella as it was
designed by Justin Frankel, and a few will include the addition of
ultrapeers.  It's nearly impossible to find a paper that accurately
describes the current state of the network  (as it exists through
mainstream clients) though.

It'd likely be a fascinating subject for researchers to study & write
papers on.  I know I'd be interested.

Sam

On 12/2/05, Bryan Turner <bryan.turner at pobox.com> wrote:
>        Ah, this is news to me :)  Thanks for the link.  I notice that this
> partial file transfer feature is only a footnote on the main protocol..  How
> wide spread is the partial file transfer feature among clients?
>
> --Bryan
> bryan.turner at pobox.com
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: p2p-hackers-bounces at zgp.org [mailto:p2p-hackers-bounces at zgp.org] On
> Behalf Of Daniel Stutzbach
> Sent: Friday, December 02, 2005 3:22 PM
> To: 'Peer-to-peer development.'
> Subject: Re: [p2p-hackers] Re: scalability
>
> On Fri, Dec 02, 2005 at 03:15:45PM -0500, Bryan Turner wrote:
> > Gnutella (I believe) doesn't meet #2,3 and partially #4,5:
> >       #2 because it does not cluster related data it will eventually
> >               be overwhelmed with content.
> >       #3 because it performs full-file transfers instead of block
> >               exchanges or partial file transfers
> >       #4/5 because clients don't immediately offer partial downloads,
> >               thus hot spots have a congestion delay measured in
> >               full-file-transfer increments rather than in block
> >               increments (an order of 2 for typical MP3s, easily
> >               reaching multiple days of congestion).
>
> If I am not mistaken, Gnutella has been doing partial file transfers for two
> or three years now.  The eDonkey/eMule network does this too.
>
> BitTorrent does not have a monopoly on this feature. :-)
>
> The relevant spec (if it can be called a spec) for Gnutella is here:
>
> http://www.the-gdf.org/wiki/index.php?title=Partial_File_Sharing_Protocol
>
> --
> Daniel Stutzbach                           Computer Science Ph.D Student
> http://www.barsoom.org/~agthorr                     University of Oregon
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