Over the past few days I've noticed some really odd behavior from gnutella. Doesn't matter whether I'm running the real thing or one of the clones, I get the same stuff:

Server counts are way down. In the past, I could expect to see anywhere from 2000-4000 servers online at any given time. Now, I'm showing somewhere between 1 and 50. It'll even tell me there's only 2 hosts when I've been connected to 4 for an hour.

Connections are getting dumped en masse. I'll be connected to 4 or 5 people, lose connection to all of them at once, and have to start from ground zero. Never saw this until recently.

Searches produce few, if any, results. I ran a search on Pink Floyd before getting dinner, came back an hour later, and had only 3 matches. Something's definitely awry; I've gotten tons of Floyd mp3s off gnutella in the past few months. Even the obvious keywords (porn, etc) often result in no matches.

I share a number of files and I usually see around 1000 uploads a day. For most of this week, I haven't gotten any more than 10 per day.

Yet despite all this, my gnucache host is serving more folks than ever. 4000+ today, which is pretty much an all-time high... And I haven't publicized my gnucache IP for quite some time.

The only developer resource I could find was gnutelladev.wego.com, but their discussion forum is practically deserted. Where are the developers lately, and do they know what's going on with the network?

My only guess so far is that someone (perhaps hired by RIAA?) has created a rogue client which drops all packets once a connection has been established... Or perhaps folks are configuring their clone's ban list with an obscenely large number of terms. This sort of client running in several locations at once could have some pretty negative results on the network.

Any ideas?

s