Hello!

Yes it is true that it is hard to find accurate statistics.The article often reffered to on many places is now over 8 months old and does not represent the present situation at all.It is estimated that the Gnutella network grows about 7% each month so it is hard do an accurate estimation.I do not even think that the Gnutella developers themselves really knows any more exactly how large the network has become because with the more recent implimentations to the Gnutella architechture it is hard to get a horizon that is large enough to do that kind of estimates.What might be even harder to know about is exactly how many people that are sharers and how many are freeloaders.But you can make qualified guesses and I share about 14Gigs and over 5000 files and by looking at the number of IP's under the Monitor tab in LimeWire (which is the client that I use) that get the File Not Found message from me I have concluded that about 40% gets that message and fails to download from me wich means about 400 attempts out of a 1000 and since I have set the limit to 20 files which someone needs to share in order to be able to download from me I would estimate that atleast 60% of the Gnutella users do share 20 files or more and since most people usually shares music files and the average size of a mp3 file is about 3.5MB it means in average that these 60% share about 3.5X20=70MB of files.This is ofcourse just guesses but it seems pretty accurate to me when comparing to some other data on various news sites(I have forgotten the specific addresses sorry).

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<img src="http://www.jordysworld.de/emoticons/blob16.gif">Sincerely Joakim Agren!