Free riding on Gnutella white paper

From: Max More (max@maxmore.com)
Date: Mon Nov 27 2000 - 17:12:02 MST


For those of you interested in Gnutella, Freenet, and other peer-to-peer
and distributed computing infrastructures, here's a good paper on the
topic, with some other more popular news stores on closely related issues:

FREE RIDING ON GNUTELLA

ABSTRACT:
An extensive analysis of user traffic on Gnutella shows a significant
amount of free riding in the system. By sampling messages on the Gnutella
network over a 24-hour period, we established that almost 70% of Gnutella
users share no files, and nearly 50% of all responses are returned by the
top 1% of sharing hosts. Furthermore, we found out that free riding is
distributed evenly between domains, so that no one group contributes
significantly more than others, and that peers that volunteer to share
files are not necessarily those who have desirable ones. We argue that free
riding leads to degradation of the system performance and adds
vulnerability to the system. If this trend continues copyright issues might
become moot compared to the possible collapse of such systems.

http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue5_10/adar/index.html

Or a PDF version (22 pages, compared to 11 pages for the above version):

http://www.parc.xerox.com/istl/groups/iea/papers/gnutella/Gnutella.pdf

Some other, less academic reports:

Harnessing the PC's power
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-201-3248711-4.html

Show Them the Money:
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-201-3248711-3.html

Will P2P companies thrive or die?
http://news.cnet.com/news//0-1005-200-2758911.html

Onward!

Max
----------------------------
Max More,
max@maxmore.com or more@extropy.org
www.maxmore.com
President, Extropy Institute. www.extropy.org
Senior Content Architect, ManyWorlds Consulting: www.manyworlds.com



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:32:06 MST