There is also a difference in terminology: while the more capable nodes which are used to condense the network are referred to as Ultrapeers in gnutella, they are called Hubs in Gnutella2, and they are also used slightly differently in topology.

Unlike Napster, where the entire network relied on the central server, gnutella cannot be shut down by shutting down any one node and it is impossible for any company to control the contents of the network, which is also due to the many free and open source gnutella clients which share the network.

A sore point with many gnutella developers is that the Gnutella2 name conveys an upgrade or superiority, which led to a Gnutella2 flame war.

G2 is not supported by many of the " old " gnutella network clients, however many Gnutella2 clients still also connect to gnutella.

Gnutella2 learned from this, and aside from having many of the added features of gnutella standard in Gnutella2, designed in future extensibility from the start.

It is more efficient, as continuing a search does not increase the network traffic exponentially, queries are not routed through as many nodes, and it increases the granularity of a search, allowing a client to stop once a pre-defined threshold of results has been obtained more effectively than in gnutella.

To address the problems of bottlenecks, gnutella developers implemented a tiered system of ultrapeers and leaves.

Also, the bandwidth cost of searching on gnutella grew exponentially to the number of connected users, often saturating connections and rendering slower nodes useless.

The Gnutella2 protocol still uses the old " GNUTELLA CONNECT / 0. 6 " handshake string for its connections as defined in the gnutella 0. 6 specifications, which was criticized by the GDF as an attempt to use the gnutella network for bootstrapping the new, unrelated network, while proponents of the network claimed that its intent was to remain backwards-compatible with gnutella to allow current gnutella clients to add Gnutella2 at their leisure.

Although this method is still usable, it is too slow to capture enough data for a topological overview of the gnutella network as it requires initiating full gnutella connections ; this involves several roundtrips to perform the header processing.

This event caused a notable drop in the size of the network because, while negotiating the injunction, LimeWire had staff add remote shutdown of gnutella access and file transfers as some users installed affected versions.

Many Gnutella2 proponents claim that this is because of political reasons, while gnutella supporters claim that the drastic changes don't have enough merit to outweigh the cost of deep rewrites.

Cabos operates on the gnutella network, while also having Mojito Distributed Hash Table ( DHT ) support.

The Gnutella2 protocol, often referred to as G2, is, despite its name, not a successor protocol of gnutella, but rather a fork.

Modern gnutella implementations, Gnutella2, as well as the now deprecated Kazaa network are examples of the hybrid model.

As examples for such networks can be named modern implementations of gnutella ( after v0. 4 ) and Gnutella2.

While some thought the goals stated for Gnutella2, primarily to make a clean break with the gnutella 0. 6 protocol and start over so that some of gnutella's less clean parts would be done more elegantly, to be impressive and desirable, other developers, primarily those of LimeWire and BearShare, thought it a " cheap publicity stunt " and discounted technical merits.

While gnutella uses a query flooding method of searching, Gnutella2 uses a walk system where a searching node gathers a list of Hubs and contacts them directly, one at a time.

These hash sums are used on gnutella and G2 ( Gnutella2 ).

Such hash sums consist of an SHA-1 Hash, followed by a TTH Hash, delimited by a point ; they are used on gnutella and G2 ( Gnutella2 ).

Gnucleus is the gnutella and Gnutella2 client project for Microsoft Windows that the GnucDNA library code originally has been developed in, before it was split to a semi-separated project.

The gnutella 0. 4 standard, although still being the latest protocol specification since all extensions only exist as proposals so far, is outdated.

This lowers the amount of traffic routed through the gnutella network, making it significantly more scalable.

This observation identified the gnutella network as an unscalable distributed system, and inspired the development of distributed hash tables, which are much more scalable but support only exact-match, rather than keyword, search.

Additionally gnutella adopted a number of other techniques to reduce traffic overhead and make searches more efficient.

An advantage often cited is Gnutella2's hybrid search is more efficient than the original gnutella query flooding, which was used in 2002.

Distributed hash tables use a more structured key-based routing in order to attain both the decentralization of Freenet and gnutella, and the efficiency and guaranteed results of Napster.

This did not stop gnutella ; after a few days, the protocol had been reverse engineered, and compatible free and open source clones began to appear.

This parallel development of different clients by different groups remains the modus operandi of gnutella development today.

The gnutella network is a fully distributed alternative to such semi-centralized systems as FastTrack ( KaZaA ) and the original Napster.

In late 2001, the gnutella client LimeWire Basic became free and open source.

In February 2002, Morpheus, a commercial file sharing group, abandoned its FastTrack-based peer-to-peer software and released a new client based on the free and open source gnutella client Gnucleus.

The word gnutella today refers not to any one project or piece of software, but to the open protocol used by the various clients.

On October 26, 2010, popular free-software gnutella servent LimeWire was ordered shut down by Judge Kimba Wood of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York when she signed a Consent Injunction which LimeWire and recording industry plaintiffs had agreed upon.

To envision how gnutella originally worked, imagine a large circle of users ( called nodes ), each of whom have gnutella client software.

Since version 0. 6, gnutella is a composite network made of leaf nodes and ultra nodes ( also called ultrapeers ).

In the classic gnutella protocol, response messages were sent back along the route the query came through, as the query itself did not contain identifying information of the node.

Second, it reduces the amount of traffic routed through the gnutella network.

In practice, this method of searching on the gnutella network was often unreliable.

Gnutella For Users has a vast amount of information about these and other improvements to gnutella in user-friendly style.

One of the benefits of having gnutella so decentralized is to make it very difficult to shut the network down and to make it a network in which the users are the only ones who can decide which content will be available.

The outdated gnutella version 0. 4 network protocol employs five different packet types, namely

These are mainly concerned with searching the gnutella network.