Trace Driven Analysis of the Long Term Evolution of Gnutella Peer-to-Peer Traffic

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) applications, such as Gnutella, are evolving to address some of the observed performance issues. In this paper, we analyze Gnutella behavior in 2003, 2005, and 2006. During this time, the protocol evolved from v0.4 to v0.6 to address problems with overhead of overlay maintenance and query traffic bandwidth. The goal of this paper is to understand whether the newer protocols address the prior concerns. We observe that the new architecture alleviated the bandwidth consumption for low capacity peers while increasing the bandwidth consumption at high capacity peers. We measured a decrease in incoming query rate. However, highly connected ultra-peers must maintain many connections to which they forward all queries thereby increasing the outgoing query traffic. We also show that these changes have not significantly improved search performance. The effective success rate experienced at a forwarding peer has only increased from 3.5% to 6.9%. Over 90% of queries forwarded by a peer do not result in any query hits. With an average query size of over 100 bytes and 30 neighbors for an ultra-peer, this results in almost 1 GB of wasted bandwidth in a 24 hour session. We outline solution approaches to solve this problem and make P2P systems viable for a diverse range of applications.