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Gnutella: A Protocol Outliving the World That Created It
51–60 of 101 posts
Re: Gnutella: A Protocol Outliving the World That Created It
#52Re: Gnutella: A Protocol Outliving the World That Created It
#53The main issue with Gnutella was - IIRC - that it didn't scale. At least the initial version, not sure if there was a revised one. Basically, if you open the log window and look at the peer messages, then beyond certain network size all you'd see was a flood of relayed search queries with duplicates that ground all other activity to the halt. And the whole thing just became unusable. PS. Also, Gnutella was released a…
We made it scale with last hop query routing. Basically we realized that 90% of the query traffic occurred on the last hop (ultrapeer to ultrapeer). So we took the keyword bloom filter we were already using on leaf node connections, aggregated those and propagated that to adjoining ultrapeers. Then we sampled response rates of queries from originating ultrapeers with increasing TTLs to get a sufficient but not overwhelming results. We also increased the ultrapeer to ultrapeer connections so that we could sample more efficiently while dropping the TTL.
That was LimeWire connections and other clients like BearShare and gtk-gnutella and possibly Gnucleus that obeyed the new protocol requirements. Others were kept in a sequestered network and deprioritized.
Re: Gnutella: A Protocol Outliving the World That Created It
#54Great article. It's been almost 20 years since I've used Gnutella, but I seem to recall that, as flexible and resilient as it was, it had some pretty major issues with speed of queries and scaling to millions of users. I think Bittorrent become popular in the mid-to-late '00s in large part because its model of redundant copies scaled better than Gnutella. > The Gnutella project began as an internal demo that leaked t…
Shout out to Gene Kan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Kan) who was the intermediary at least for the release of the Gnutella spec and reference client from Nullsoft and an early supporter. He died too young.
Re: Gnutella: A Protocol Outliving the World That Created It
#55Hot take: the simple reason Gnutella declined is that it was replaced by Bittorrent.
Gnutella's original sin was that it combined distributed search with distributed download. In a rational world, that would be smart and good but in a litigious world, that was too sophisticated for the Supreme Court and they ruled it as infringing on copyright through inducement of the user. Gnutella clients, like other P2P clients with search, got sued out of existence.
Bittorrent offloaded the distributed search onto websites which routinely got sued or shutdown. Funnily enough, one of my big improvements to Gnutella in the first year of LimeWire was to drive out the website users because they were overwhelming the network upload capabilities without adding to them. That improved the 90% download failures in 2001 but interesting to wonder what if we had gone another way.
Re: Gnutella: A Protocol Outliving the World That Created It
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
or was it Windows hiding file extensions by default and you downloaded a .mp3.exe file?
Nope. It had been renamed from .avi. CP.
You'd think it wouldn't be that hard for a client to automatically check if a file is what it claims to be after downloading.
Re: Gnutella: A Protocol Outliving the World That Created It
#57As the eldest of millennials, I regularly find myself going through “ah, they’ve reinvented a situation best served by Gnutellla” events. The most most recent was an ad hoc Resilio Sync library of epub files, and I did the “yeah that works… but have you ever heard of Gnutella?” routine I have become so accustomed to: “gather around the camp fire, young zoomers, for grandpa has a story to tell you”.
Re: Gnutella: A Protocol Outliving the World That Created It
#58Thank you for reminding me about this. Next to soulseek I'm going to use it to not obey!
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Re: Gnutella: A Protocol Outliving the World That Created It
#59I'd say the biggest reason that Gnutella (and other services like it) is no longer in much use is because for a long, long time now the easiest way to download music for free, without ads, and with virtually zero chance of getting caught, has been via YouTube and downloader clients. For most practical uses, it's good enough.
You wouldn't want to share the resulting downloads (not only is the audio quality slightly degraded, but I imagine it's highly likely there would be audio watermarks), but when everybody can download straight from YouTube anyway with a minimum of hassle, why would you need to share anything other than a video URL?
Of course, a big part of why this is so simple is because of the massive amount of work that the downloader client devs put into working around YouTube's attempts to stop this. I imagine it can be a difficult job.
If YouTube ever win the battle against the downloader clients, I imagine the landscape will change again. Maybe Gnutella will make a comeback.
Re: Gnutella: A Protocol Outliving the World That Created It
#60On a tangent OiNK's Pink Palace never died either, if you know you know…
The high seas have never been better.