Useful volumes of shared material

[topbanana]

All,

I've been pondering of late about how much material is required to saturate a given amount of available upload bandwidth and have come up with what I hope are few useful data points based on a months worth of logs made available to me. Naturally the volume of shared content required to generate a given amount of upload depends on what is being shared - it's an inevitable fact that illegal mp3s of the latest improbably perky teen sensation's songs - and videos claiming to show said perky teen copulating with a goat - will be downloaded more often than legal content. With this in mind I've gathered data points for three categories of material:

• Illegal content - mp3s of top-ten hits (of any nation) from the last two years.
• Legal unique content - Free material not commonly available on limewire (I used out-of-copyright ASCII texts)
• Legal mirrored content - Copes of (hopefully) legal files which commonly show up more than 20 sources in LimeWire 3.6.

I've settled upon 'Total Upload Average' > 80% of available upload capacity on a peer-node as a suitable definition of 'saturation'. Data from nodes younger than four hours was ignored. Servers with a firewall blocking incoming connections on non-approved ports were treated seperately from those on a 'raw' internet connection.

MB shared to saturate 1KB/s upload capacity 
-------------------------------------------------------------------
|                          |   No Firewall    |     Firewall      |
-------------------------------------------------------------------
|        Illegal content   |   29.3           |    106.5          |
-------------------------------------------------------------------
|   Legal unique content   |   186            |    1023           |
-------------------------------------------------------------------
| Legal mirrored content   |   161            |    1033           |
-------------------------------------------------------------------

So if you're wanting to upload 8K/second of popular legal files (and are not behind a firewall) you've downloaded, set aside 161MB x 8 = 1.3GB of disk space. If you've 20GB of unique legal content shared from behind a firewall, expect it to consume 20 x 1024 / 1023 = 20KB/s of upload capacity.

Hardly startling stuff, but there are a few interesting points to note. Firstly, people trying to download 'illegal content' are able to make far better use of file shared from behind a firewall. This indicates they are far less likely to be behind a firewall themselves - one might conclude they are novice net users unaware of good networking practices. Secondly, demand for legitimate content exists. While less popular than 'illegal content' by a factor of 6 or 10, that over 10% of the demand for file sharing is driven by legit content (at least on the gnet) is a heartening sign. Thirdly, downloaders of files which are widely available on the gnet significantly favour non-firewalled sources - at least some gnutella clients are able to select a subset of 'easy' hosts to download from.

[LeeWare]

I currently have 349 completely legal titles online [I created them myself] mainly in the form of video material. I've done various posts on various forums outlining the popularity of content by type. In fact many have done in depth studies and just like yours they all end with pretty much the same conclusion.

For the last couple of years LeeWare Development has been distributing files {non-infringing content on p2p networks} We have produced between 300 - 400 titles many of which are just posted in various formats. If you search Gnutella for the keyword CBT (Computer Based Training) you will see the content we are hosting. Right now we have online 349 files and we will be adding more each week. The total amount of GB shared is close to 7GB of content mainly Video.

We've learned the following things in our trials.

1 - In this type of network File Naming is important. It makes it easier for people to find your content and it creates a since of order.

2 - Host stability is a must. If you are going to distribute content on a filesharing network you have to maintain a stable source for the content. You can't depend on the community because most users are leeches. However, in LeeWare Development's case that's okay because we maintain an asychronous relationship to the network where we are at the distribution end and the users are on the consumption end. Host stability creates a positive experience for the file consumer.

3 - Know your target audience. We have two target audiences. Those that are specifically interested in the content that we distribute and casual browsers [those that use the network looking for ANYTHING interesting.]

We've made several attempts to get people to become part of our distribution network. But we haven't had any serious takers again most users want to get content but not return the favor. In fairness I have to point out that as I connect to different file sharing systems and networks I am able to find content that we produced being sharing by a fair number of hosts. This is promising but I would like to see this on a wider scale.

In fact in the last 76 hours we have pushed out 16GB of content via our Limewire Servets each server showing 1000+ completed file transfers.

[topbanana]

16GB/76hours = 5.05GB/day = 61.2KB/s

From my small study, 3GB of 'new unique content' should saturate an available upload bandwidth of 16.5K/second, making your content almost four times as popular as the norm, although still about half as popular as 'illegal content'.

The wide availability of your CBT files and good naming will certainly account for some of the popularity, as will I'm sure the quality of your offering - kudos to you.