I have done a quick survey of the Gnutella network ("Bearshare", "Limewire", "Xolox",...) and the Fasttack network ("Morpheus", "KaZaA", "Grokster").

Fasttrack ("Morpheus") reports a very high user base (>100000 user) compared with Gnutella (>10000 user). Nevertheless, the search results on the Gnutella network seem to be more than on the Fasttrack network.

My key results are: Even if Fasttrack reported over 22 times more users than Gnutella users (counted by the www.limewire.com Gnutella survey), Gnutella found over 8 times more search results.

I suspect that the reported user number of the Fasttrack network is highly exaggerated. One other possibility is that the Fasttrack network is at least 22*8=176 times less efficient than Gnutella. Since there are no objective Fasttrack monitoring services, I severely doubt their numbers.

Stefan Scheller
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TEST PROTOCOL

Internet node: ADSL 768/136 kbps up/down, T-Online (Germany)

Fasttrack
Client: Morpheus 1.3.3
Started: 11.Sep.2001, 00:52 MESZ (GMT+2)
reported: 629325 users, 75.7M files, 387 TByte

Gnutella
Client: Xolox 1.11
Started: 11.Sep.2001, 00:52 MESZ (GMT+2)
reported (Statistics from www.limewire.com): about 28000 users

Fasttrack reports 629325/28000 = 22.5 times more users than Gnutella.

waiting until 01:02 MESZ (10 minutes total) until first search
(network connections are allowed to stabilize)
all searches are done without any restrictions (media type, adult)
I used search words which are not so familiar, because
Morpheus has a limit of 100 returned results.

Search results after 1 minute of searching:
"Heintje" -- Morpheus: 14 files, Xolox: 29 files
"Alcazar" -- Morpheus: 39 files, Xolox: 80 files
"space odyssey" -- Morpheus: 25 files, Xolox: 163 files
"Kournikova" -- Morpheus: 61 files, Xolox: 826 files
"musical offering" -- Morpheus: 0 files, Xolox: 17 files

combined search results:
Fasttack/Morpheus: 139
Gnutella/Xolox: 1115

Xolox found 1115/139 = 8 times more files than Morpheus.

FastTrack is reporting 629325 users because that's the total number of users on the network (its central server keeps track of that number). Since gnutella has no central server, Xolox can only report the number of users in its horizon, which is probably only a fraction of the real total. When you search FastTrack, your query probably only reaches about the same number of hosts as a query on gnutella (not the entire network for either). I don't know how many connections either Morpheus or Xolox establishes with other hosts by default, but if you have a fast connection it's concievable that Xolox is connecting directly to more hosts than Morpheus is thus giving you a larger horizon (28000 does seem large). If you knew exactly how many direct connections you had (try using "netstat -a" from the dos prompt without any other network applications running) then you might be able to better compare the two networks. At any rate, the total number of simultaneous users on either network isn't relevent.