Characterizing files in the modern Gnutella network: a measurement study

The Internet has witnessed an explosive increase in the popularity of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file-sharing applications during the past few years. As these applications become more popular, it becomes increasingly important to characterize their behavior in order to improve their performance and quantify their impact on the network. In this paper, we present a measurement study on characteristics of available files in the modern Gnutella system. We developed a new methodology to capture accurate "snapshots" of available files in a large scale P2P system. This methodology was implemented in a parallel crawler that captures the <i>entire</i> overlay topology of the system where each peer in the overlay is annotated with its available files. We have captured tens of snapshots of the Gnutella system and conducted three types of analysis on available files: <i> (i)</i> Static analysis, <i>(ii)</i> Topological analysis and <i>(iii)</i> Dynamic analysis. Our results reveal several interesting properties of available files in Gnutella that can be leveraged to improve the design and evaluations of P2P file-sharing applications.