Crawling Gnutella: Lessons Learned

Since its inception in early 2000, the Gnutella network has been the subject of numerous topology measurement studies. Although those studies vastly improved our understanding of the network, and of unstructured peer-to-peer networks in general, they did not address the problem of obtaining accurate measurements efficiently. In this paper we discuss how to adapt existing measurement approaches to features provided by version 0.6 of the Gnutella protocol, present the results of several measurement experiments, and analyze collected data with an eye towards identifying efficient and accurate measurement techniques.