Ten weeks in the life of an eDonkey server

TL;DR

This paper analyzes ten weeks of eDonkey server query data, revealing complex user and file interactions, and provides a large, publicly available dataset for further research.

Contribution

It presents the first large-scale, detailed dataset of eDonkey server queries and discusses data acquisition challenges and solutions.

Findings

Nearly 9 billion messages analyzed

Data includes 90 million users and 275 million files

Evidence of non-trivial user and file interaction patterns

Abstract

This paper presents a capture of the queries managed by an eDonkey server during almost 10 weeks, leading to the observation of almost 9 billion messages involving almost 90 million users and more than 275 million distinct files. Acquisition and management of such data raises several challenges, which we discuss as well as the solutions we developed. We obtain a very rich dataset, orders of magnitude larger than previously avalaible ones, which we provide for public use. We finally present basic analysis of the obtained data, which already gives evidence of non-trivial features.