I was thinking about a new way to imporve performance
in the gnutella network. Since I come from the network
engeneering world my Idea is closely related to a network
protocol (namely BGP):

What about building clusters of Gnutella nodes - which in turn
behave as a single servent. This would require to store
all shared files in a replicated database. Each node of a cluster
has its version of the database - cluster external files
(determined by cache hits) are stored as external files in the
db.

One or two master browsers could be ellected to represent the
cluster to the outside world, answering the requests to the
outside world (from the data within the shared db).

Searches within the cluster can be made using the db - if this turns out to be insufficient, requests are made to the masterbrowser, which forwards them to the net.

Hannes R. Boehm