Why Gnutella Can't Scale. No, Really

[Adam Back]

Jordan Ritter (napster co-founder) wrote this, which RAH forwarded to
the DBS list.

http://www.monkey.org/~dugsong/mirror/gnutella.html

So I'm presuming why people compare gnutella favorably to napster is
because napster is flawed at a different level: it is not robust
against legal attack.  The very recent developments highlight the
fragility of the napster model.

This is not a criticism of napster or gnutella, but comparing them
directly is difficult, gnutella is trying to do a much harder thing.
It is typically much easier to design, and build hierarchical systems.
Fully distributed algorithms and protocols with good characteristics
are hard to design.  But distributed systems _can_ be designed, and to
some extent their performance and scalability predicted.

So Gnutella has it's problems.  However I wouldn't say that
distributed sharing can't work, just that the first version of
Gnutella wasn't very scalable.  There are other systems: FreeNet,
MojoNation, which perhaps are better.


For one set of commentators the interesting factor is the ability of
the distributed document space to be censor resistant; it's one major
part of the application which generates the hype.  So Napster doomed
itself by being scalable enough to get enough users that it generated
enough press (mostly centered around distribution of arguably
copyrighted materials) to make the media industry notice it and the
predictable result follows.

It may be that Napster will continue in the form of the open napster
clones, even if Napster the company is prevented.  Anyone can start
napster servers at this point.  So this is the short term easier thing
to do: create lots of reasonably large individually hierarchical
napster clones.  We know the web is reasonably censor resistant, web
pages get shut down, but the content resurfaces at other sites, in
different jurisdictions, etc.  As long as there is an interest (and
there clearly is), new servers will pop up faster than the censors can
shut them down.

Adam

Personal opinions only, of course