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.