Lately, it seems that a lot of problems have been blamed on network congestion. The increase in the number of clients is not a problem in and of itself. The problem is that so many of the clients are not sharing files (or sharing very few).

When many of the clients don't share files, it becomes much harder for a search to hit. For instance, if I send a search out in which few clients are sharing files, my TTL may die before the search finds a match. Each client sharing zero files needlessly reduces my TTL.


My suggestion is this....

1) By default clients should NOT share files. (for obvious security and configuration issues)

2) If a client does not share files, no other client will connect to it. It should not be stored in any host catchers. In other words, if the client does not share files, it should not recieve (or accept) incomming connections. (outgoing are still fine, of course)

3) If a client does not share files, no searches will be routed to it. (there's nothing to search there anyway. The drop in TTL can better be used somewhere else)


These rules basically do one thing: it ensures that clients not sharing files are dead ends on the gnutella net. The only traffic they recive are their own search results.

This concentrates search queries to clients that are actually sharing something, drastically increasing the chance for search hits for everyone. Plus, it would reduce the gnutella net traffic some without harming the gnutella net.

I'm not certain if this would require a change in the protocol. I don't think so. Clients not sharing files could simply never respond to a PING with a PONG. Thus its IP never gets published on the network. Also, should a client's IP become published for some reason, it could simply refuse all incomming connectons.

Anyway, what do you think? I don't mind critisism as long as it is reasonable and not simply flame.