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.

The truth is the number of G-net users is very hard to gauge accurately. Most estimates are probably conservative.

Also I think, being more complex, it attracts a more serious class of user and might have more people sharing files.

Xolox is so much better then FT products it ain't even funny.

With gnuttela the search is not done with all the users, but with the users you are connected to (horizon is approx 500/1500 users depending of your setting)

So the efficiency of the search is not related to the number of people using the network and cant be used to verify that fastrack is most used than gnuttela

I believe that gnuttela is used by at least hundred of thousand of people every day far more than fasttrack.