Thx for the answers at first Let me take this a little further ...

So if I read this correctly this would mean that if I ping my neighbours I will still get the response as decribed in the Gnutella Standard Definition (0.4), or do I get something wrong now?

It looks like most clients limit the TTL time to 7 or something so my horizon is usually around 7 hops. But within this horizon I "should" get back as many pongs as clients available.

The only reason why this pinging for servent detection could not work as described in the Gnutella Standard have been the following facts and I try to get some information (i.e. with this question) whether these will have efect on the number of returned pongs:

1) Pong Caches - but it seems except Qtella no client uses one yet right?

2) MIN_TIME_PING, meaning that a client will throw away any pings from a client if the last ping waas not longer ago than this minimu time to protect the network from ping flooding. - I guess there are some client that do that. I tried to send 10 pings to the attaced servents but most of them answered to only a few them?!?!?

3) TTL_MAX values (=6-7) - my logs show that ecven if I send a deep-space ping with 20 I will get back a hop count at max equal to 10, BUT 8,9 and 10 are VERY rare! -> this means that most clients limit the TTL from packets they send (and forward) to a maximum TTL of 7 (respectively they use 7-HOPS= NEW_TTL)

Anything wrong with this here???

By the way another thing I found as interesting is how Qtella "measures" the number of servents behind a servent attached: It counts every recceived Pong, Query, QueryHit or Push asa a new client (-> Number++) and saves the servents IP and the time when the message was received. After a 3 seconds it deletes all servents from that list that it did not here of again for 40 seconds.

How accurate do you think that number of clients is? Or would it be more accurate to use Pings to estimate/exactly measure the number of clients in your horizon?

BTW: No worry I am not working for a company or something, just writing my thesis on scalability issues in Gnutella networks..

Thanks again ... I appretiate the feedback