Since Fasttrack might be shut down soon, or at least the kazaa client is not available for download anymore. according to this: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-8513895.html (although the linux client is still online). I was having some thoughts about if Gnutella could be shut down.

Now why am I posting this here and not in General Gnutella Discussions? My thoughts lead me to the only vulnerability, gnutella has and that is probably it's hostcaches. - It might be true, that there would be a gnutella-net after shutting down the hostcaches, but what could prevent it from breaking up into many small not interconnected networks.

What LimeWire would need in that case, would be a feature that new users to connect to the network with (ideally) only one IP of another client that is currently running and at the same time, after the smallest possible amount of time, LimeWire would have to collect as many hosts as possible, to be able to reconnect to the network after being shut down for a few days or so.

Currently the gnutella.net files contain up to 500 hosts, but reconnecting with those 500 hosts will not work for sure. (It does not work for me, at least).

On way to improve that kind of behaviour could be, to collect more hosts, but more hosts mean a lot more hosts, - e.g. 2500 or so. Another way would be, to choose say a couple of hundred of hosts, which have the longest uptime. To accomplish this, you would need an algorithm, that dynamically finds the fastest and most accessible hosts on the net.

Here is my idea, about that algorithm.

Every 30 Minutes or so an ultrapeer sends a message with IP-Adresses of a number of other ultrapeers via all incoming connections. The list of IP-Adresses, to be sent by an ultrapeer should include:
a) all ultrapeers it has outgoing connections to
b) those ultrapeers whose adresses it has received most often during let's say the last 5 hours.

In case a servant wants to connect to a new host it tries the top ranked ultrapeers from b). If the connection fails that specific host is removed from that ranking.

I have absolutely no clue whether or not this will work but to ensure the robustness of Gnutella we should do something...