I am curious about the "Network Size" statistics on the Limewire.com site. Looking at the historical info, it looks like Summer 2001 was big and then went on a downhill slide. Then there was a big spike in early March 02 and another, long, downhill slide, all the while the degree of variability decreasing along with the absolute numbers. Can someone provide some perspective on these numbers? I'm relatively new to Gnutella, having started using it only a few months ago. Frankly, I find that the graphs look, well, rather depressing.

I don't know for sure, since I really don't pay much attention to it. However, if I were to guess, I'd say the first one was when Napster was originally shut down, and the second one had something to do with Kazaa shutting down, or Morpheus attaching to the Gnutella network or something like that.

Actually gnutella is growing about 3% every month. The host graph is not compatible with the current network structure and miscalculates the networks size by a factor between 3 and 10.