Re: [Help-gnunet] Is my reputation hurting me?

[Christian Grothoff]

On Freitag, 11. Juli 2003 20:02 Lance Simmons wrote:
> For the first week or so I had a gnunet node running, I was able to
> retrieve files pretty easily.  Since then, though, things have really
> slowed down.  Now it seems that gnunet-download can run for days at a
> time without retrieving anything, no matter what file I'm requesting.
>
> Is my reputation hurting me?

No, it can not (compared with a new node). The trust system can only hurt if 
other people have more trust now than you do, but a fresh node will always do 
worse. I would suspect that the network is different now. Typically, I see it 
about double in size after a release and then slowly go back down to about a 
dozen nodes. I suspect this is people trying it and not keeping the peers 
running (why they don't keep them running? maybe stability, maybe 
disinterest, maybe that they don't like it, maybe that it takes too many 
resources). Either way, if the network grows larger, this effect of 
significant changes to the network over time should get smaller. 

While Igor's remarks about search-results are of course correct, I would 
suspect that we see the problem more pronounced because the network is so 
small (and thus the possibilities for replication are minimal).  Either way, 
I concur with his diagnosis that you don't receive files because the 
providing node went off-line.

Christian
P.S.: I'm leaving for Darmstadt (ECOOP) and then Las Vegas (DefCon) today, so 
I'll probably be slower at answering questions / bugreports for a while.