New Report Indicates WinMX Flies Under Throttling Radar

[GhostShip]

Folks some some weeks ago I posted a topic related to the French anti-filesharing groups, who conducted some filtering equipment tests, it seems more details have emerged. My thanks for finding this article go to "IceCube" Over at Slycks, cheers IceCube 

http://www.zeropaid.com/news/9409/P2P+ISP+Filtering+Test+Published%2C+Labels+Deny+Ensuing+Criticism

The primary source of the report.

http://www.internetevolution.com/document.asp?doc_id=148803

Out of 28 software vendors, 5 actually agreed to start the test and only 2 allowed the results to be published. Internet Evolution describes the results as "not perfect"

Identifying traffic proved difficult at the best of times. Bear in mind that these were likely the two top performing applications. According to the study, the two vendors which actually agreed to have the results published had the following detection rates

P2P Protocol Detection Efficiency
                            Ellacoya E30              Ipoque PRX-5G

BitTorrent                   82%                          97%
eDonkey                     97%                          88%
Gnutella                      76%                          96%
FastTrack                      1%                          97%
MP2P                         86%                          96%
iMesh                           0%                          47%
FileTopia                     33%                          23%
WinMX                         7%                           0%
SoulSeek                      1%                           5%
DirectConnect              7%                           78%
 
The following table shows the percentage of how efficiently P2P traffic was regulated:

P2P Protocol Regulation Efficiency
                             Ellacoya E30             Ipoque PRX-5G
25% Regulation    
BitTorrent                   88%                          88%
eDonkey                     36%                          63%
Gnutella                      83%                          93%
FastTrack                    27%                          91%
MP2P                         93%                          92%
iMesh                           0%                          43%
FileTopia                     32%                          16%
WinMX                        19%                           0%
SoulSeek                      0%                            0%
DirectConnect              12%                         63%

75% Regulation   

BitTorrent                    90%                          100%
eDonkey                      40%                            67%
Gnutella                       57%                            63%
FastTrack                     97%                            78%
MP2P                           92%                           93%
iMesh                             0%                           97%
FileTopia                       85%                            4%
WinMX                           0%                            0% 
SoulSeek                        0%                            2%
DirectConnect               24%                           58%
 

But wait, what about encrypted traffic? This was also tested and the results were obviously less than stellar on the vendors part. eDonkey traffic completely fell off the radar for both vendors while only Ipoque PRX-5G could not detect even half of the RC4 encrypted BitTorrent traffic.

Then there's dumping the traffic onto MPLS L3 VPN. Interestingly enough, only Arbor/Ellacoya even had the capability in the first place, but the performance was above 90% for the 3 protocols tested. There's plenty of other interesting findings in the study overall and definitely worth the read. For some, it may only serve to confirm that ISP level p2p filtering is not ready for "prime time" given that the existing encryption has a tendency to circumvent the software already. This goes over top of the well known fact that once moves are made to filter out P2P traffic, many developers of the technology are more than willing to develop new encryption methods to circumvent any new measure that comes their way.

Whilst labelling us as a "nearly dead network" in this report it seems the superior WinMX design features have been very long lasting, for a protocol designed in 2001 to still be up and running without change and outgunning newer networks is nothing short of amazing.

This is surely a feather in WinMX Technologies Cap 

[']['affy]

winmx is still 1 of the best p2p's around aslong as we have the die hard mxer nothing will beat us and once someone can create mx and use torrents on it it will be #1 once again

[GhostShip]

String is currently investigating the sequential nature of the file transfer function and will no doubt be looking at ways to make some improvements over the current method as well as helping build on the community knowledge base I hope, its nice to know folks are still working on these important aspects that many take for granted.