

Using these snapshots, we conduct three types of analysis on available files: (1) Static analysis, (2) Topological analysis, and (3) dynamic analysis. We have captured more than 50 snapshots of the Gnutella system that span over 1 year period.

These methodologies were implemented in a parallel crawler that captures the entire overlay topology of the system where each peer in the overlay is annotated with its available files. We develop two new methodologies to capture accurate snapshots of available files in a large-scale P2P system. In this paper, we present a measurement study on characteristics of available files in the modern Gnutella system. 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. The Internet has witnessed an explosive increase in the popularity of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file-sharing applications during the past few years.
