Gnutella Network Triples In Size, RIAA Can't Be Happy

[JackSpratts]

Since the Morpheus debacle last week, the fledgling Gnutella network (Gnuwork?) has increased its' user base substantially, further complicating efforts of anti-swapping interests to control the internets' commonplace file sharing.

In this CNN article you'll also find more info on the reason$ Fasttrack shut out Morpheus - and why Morpheus didn't pay.

- js.

[TankGirl]

Thanks for the link, Jack.

The rough ride of Morpheus has put perhaps millions of p2p users on the move. This - much like Napster's demise - seems just to boost the p2p technology and the filesharing phenomenon itself. Napster's shutdown was a boost to the OpenNap scene and out of that scene emerged Music City's popular server cluster with enough people to give a great kick start to Morpheus and its new technology.

Gnutella clients have evolved a lot since their early days and many old characterizations of Gnutella are no longer valid. Well-proven technical ideas like supernodes and multisourcing have been introduced into Gnutella as well and this makes a big difference in connectivity and download speeds. The heavy influx of newbies into the network is just what Gnutella needs to test its present scalability and general functionality. And there is one thing that Gnutella has got right from the beginning: full decentralization which makes the network almost impossible to kill.

- tg

[assorted]

I just ran gnucleus for the first time in some time (but i've updated to 1.6.3). i picked up my minimum of 4 nodes fairly quickly and then saw that each node had about 5-15 "friends" each... putting my total for the network at about 100 and about 100,000 MB; pretty pathetic.

So I removed all except the "largest" node (a whopping 35) to try again. This time my luck fared a little better connecting to around 300 "friends" with 300,000 MB shared. Still pretty pathetic.

Is this what's happening to people using Morpheus? Cuz they are gonna lose a lot of users if that is the case.

Also, this is EXACTLY what happened to gnutella 0.55 when napster closed. I remember it as exactly the same problem, connecting to nodes that aren't connecting to very many people at all and therefore getting shit for search results.... I remember later they blamed the problems on 56kers but really I think the problem lies with such a massive # of people logging on and off very quickly.

Wouldn't a solution to be to build into the client a demand to keep dropping nodes or adding them unless a minimum # of total "friends" is met?