Large scale analysis of the eDonkey P2P file sharing system

This paper presents a general numerical method to evaluate the download times in a P2P file sharing application with linear time and memory requirements with respect to the number of different files shared in the system. As this number typically exceeds several million and as the dependencies between file download times grow exponentially with the number of files, this method is useful to study realistic size systems. We apply the method on a system of 20000 files using parameters observed on a real network. The resulting performance is discussed. We show how the method may be extended to take into account initial waiting times before download and present the resulting performance.