DO YOU ENJOY YOUR SOFTWARE? If yes, please read the following statement from the Gnutella community. And hey... pls pass this file on to everybody you know + stick it into each software archive you are sharing through Gnutella. 3 March 2001 Gnutella update: The network is dying, again...Average hosts on the network have risen to 12K, but the number of users accepting connections has fallen to less than 3,000. And only a small percent of those are actually sharing files. Search results are getting very spotty and it is increasingly difficult to download anything. 6 March 2001 It's getting worse. We're down to less than 2,000 hosts accepting connections. I have unshared most of my files until I see some more cooperation from the Freeloaders. http://www.limewire.com/hostcount.htm#today If you are reading this and are not sharing files, please start. Otherwise YOU will be personally responsible for destroying the Gnutella Community. If you a new user, please read the following: Unlike Napster, you MUST SHARE THE FILES YOU DOWNLOAD less the network decays and dies. Read on... ============== Do you share files? If so, GOOD JOB! "A recent study by Eytan Adar and Bernardo Huberman of Xerox PARC examined the traffic on Gnutella and discovered that there were an awful lot of "free riders," users who were happy to download files but weren't willing to share their own. In fact, 70 percent of all Gnutella users don't share files, and of the 30 percent who do, the top 1 percent share 40 percent of all files. During a 24-hour period, Adar and Huberman observed 31,395 hosts -- but of that group, 314 hosts were serving the majority of the files. "It's the tragedy of the commons, writ for the digital age: Shared resources are being gobbled by users who get more than they give. "There's very little reward for you sharing your files, and there's a cost," explains Adar. "You're anonymous so you can't get credited for doing what you're doing -- no one says 'good job' for doing this. And it's a cost, because [due to bandwidth limitations] even if you're on a DSL connection you can't do other things that you want to do. People realize that they come out on the negative side and don't want to share files." The most obvious drawback of free riding is that if only a tiny percentage of users are sharing, it will be harder to find the files you want...But free riding is more problematic than Kan will admit. Free riding also means that Gnutella won't scale: EACH SEARCH QUERY PLUGGED INTO GNUTELLA HAS A CERTAIN "TIME TO LIVE," AND WILL EXPIRE AFTER IT HAS QUERIED A CERTAIN NUMBER OF HOSTS. IF THE NETWORK CONTINUES TO GROW, AND NO ONE IS PROVIDING ANY FILES, YOUR QUERY WILL HIT ITS EXPIRATION DATE BEFORE IT ARRIVES AT A USEFUL HOST." - from Salon ============== What this means, simply, is that when you search for a file, you use up some of the resources WHICH ARE NOT REPLACED unless you turn around and share the files you downloaded and kept. The next new user will get less search results. Eventually, most users will get little or no search results. No results, no files. Furthermore, as the network grows it becomes harder and harder to find an open download slot. Those few who share the majority of popular files only have a finite amount of bandwidth. What? - you say you only have a dial-up connection or a rip-off DSL or Cable upload speed of only 70-90 kbps? Read on: You CAN share files and do other things with your connection too! Most clients let you control the number of connections to your machine and the bandwidth they consume. That way, you can have a limited gnutella connection running in the background and most of the bandwidth will still be reserved for yourself. Share a dozen MP3 files or 20 MB of images and e-texts. Allow one or two upload connections and that's all it takes. Remember, if you download files and want the gnutella network to survive, make those same files available so others can download them too. Thanks and keep sharing! :)