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

Yes, sounds very good!

Sound like seperating normal peers from super peers (see details below). Something that FastTrack (Morpheus/Kazza/Grokster) allready does or AFAIK Bearshare's upcoming gnutella client called "Defender".

Greets, Moak

PS: Oh, and it seems that Limewire comes out with a Superpeer Betaversion too (thx Morgwen):
http://www.gnutellaforums.com/showth...&threadid=5222

I like the LimeWire images a lot...
so here a diagram of a gnutella network with superpeers (hope that's okay, afisk):

Attached Images

supernode_diagram.gif (9.0 KB, 222 views)

Here the (current) Gnutella network toplogy without superpeers:

Attached Images

current_diagram.gif (3.6 KB, 210 views)

Hi!

The following is a repost of this thread (read the whole discusion there, and from an older german document):

I try to give a short overview of my idea for a possible future gnutella client. Before I start let me say, I have NOTHING against free loading, freeloaders are NOT evil, blocking freeloaders is stupid! Sharing means giving, if you can give more than others, just do it, you make some souls happy.

The goals for a future client might be: more available files for modem AND high bandwith users, stop freeloading by making modem users a valuable part of the network, less backbone traffic and broadcasts. A short overview:
Servants are split up into superpeers (hosts with DSL or high speed connection) and normal peers (modem users), FastTrack uses this network topology allready. The normal peers do NOT connect to many other peers (to reduce gnutella backbone traffic, less or no traffic routing), but the super peers do (they are used as a kind of gnutella reflector, caching search results, sheilding clients from all of the unnecessary messaging on the rest of the network).

All servants - even modem users - do spread often requested files all over the gnutella network: swarming of very small parts (e.g. 100 KB). When all modem users would share only 5% of their bandwith for uploading swarming parts, there would be a huge amount of extra bandwith = faster download for all, nearly no cost for modem users, necessity for freeloading eliminated. While modem users are idle or wait for downloads, they can automatically share with full bandwith. Okay this is theory and all clients have to provide parallel downloads from multiple hosts (like Xolox does).

Thx for reading, Moaky Moak