Gnutella (was: Re: yaws)

[Joe Armstrong]

On Tuesday 12 February 2002 12:50 pm, Willem Broekema wrote:
> Joe Armstrong wrote:
> > Yes - I did this as well Gnutella sucketh *greatly* - you get a flood of
> > totaally meaningless messages which are bascially junk. There is also
> > no way of killing of a down-stream query - terrible protocol - brain
> > dead.
>
> Me too, I'm also (not very actively) working on a client. Gnutella is
> indeed not very advanced, but there are interesting developments going on
> like "Ultrapeer" nodes that each handle most of the traffic for tens of
> regular leaf nodes.
>
> Not sure what "meaningless messages" you're talking about?

Meaningless in the sence that the messages carried no useful data
(for example, IPs of dead machines etc.) sure they were correctly formatted
but they contained no useful data. The other thing I noticed was an alarming 
tendency for nodes to just break-off communication for no apparent reason.
A lot of nodes don't hang around for long-enough to do something useful.

The other thing that sucks is that once you have finished a session other 
machines in the net can port-scan you for a long time to see if you're still
alive.

>
> By the way, if you or Vlad have some code for an Erlang client lying
> around, I'd surely like to see it. I have my client basically working, but
> I'm sure I learn something by looking at your code! :-)
>
> - Willem