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The easiest way to improve your experience while using Aimster, Kazaa or Bearshare is to install the Improved Marketscore. It is completely FREE, takes five minutes to install and you will surf 100% faster. Just follow this link Kazaa, Aimster or Bearshare? Which is the best decentralized file sharing system?
Since Napster began filtering songs, several Napster alternatives have grown in popularity amongst music users. Many of them still use central servers like Napster, where the file searching and identification is processed on computers owned by the operators. Others have tried to design these processes so that there is no need for central servers. The three most popular approaches to this decentralized approach are Kazaa, Aimster and Gnutella (whose most popular client is Bearshare) Decentralization of the system gives it a better chance of avoiding being forced to filter or close down. Decentralized approaches to file sharing require co-operation between users. Unfortunately because users' machines are not as reliable as commercially operated machines and because users' machines need to take more of the processing load, this puts increased strain on each user's computer's CPU, memory and bandwidth connection. Below I compare the performance of each of these systems in terms of their overall appeal, their performance and the availability of songs on each of the networks.
Overall Properties First up, I look at some overall properties of the three systems. Because some of these systems are getting a lot of press at the moment, I wanted to differentiate between how many times a user might see the system noticed around the Internet and how many times it is actually downloaded. To measure popularity, I looked at the number of downloads on Download.com. To find the number of times that product has been mentioned in the news in the last month, I did a search for each product on globalarchive.ft.com.
In this general category, Bearshare is the winner with Kazaa in second place. It is the most popular and although, its business model is built on adware, this adware is completely optional and shouldn't provide too many problems for users. It is also the most likely to survive, even though its performance will likely suffer as the Gnutella network grows. Interestingly, Aimster has the most references in the online press to it, but it proves to be far less popular at least on Download.com than the others.
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Aimster wins this category but not by much over Bearshare. Kazaa uses an incredibly high amount of CPU time to the point where it is almost unusable. These tests were performed using a Celeron 700 so 95% is pretty heavy going. Kazaa also uses more memory than the others. However, it definitely has more intelligent download control mechanisms than the other two - it spreads the download across a number of users and looks for the fastest place to download automatically. In addition, it allows uses to completely control how much bandwidth uploads use. Kazaa would completely rule this category if it wasn't for its incredibly high use of computer resources. I can't really explain this because its close cousin, Morpheus does not use anywhere near the amount of resources that it does.
Availability of Content Finally, I consider the availability of content on each of these systems. Note that I am not encouraging anybody to go and download copyright content - there is a lot of good legal content on these systems available. The truth is though, that the trend to date has been that where there is more copyright content, there is also more legal content. Also these systems have problems with success rates. Even though there might be a lot of users are reported as sharing the content, it does not mean that the content will be available to all. To test this, I moved down the top 20 list of results for a popular song and counted what percentage of times the file download was not able to be downloaded. Again, I waited until Bearshare had made connections to three outgoing servers. Of course, its a bit random with Bearshare because you can't easily control whether you land in a good part of the network or not and the results vary great.
Kazaa easily wins this category. It has both the most content available overall and these files are much more often available to download that the others. Aimster had a very high failure rate and Bearshare's results are mixed. It is clear though, that there is still a lot of content available on all of these systems .
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Conclusions As you might expect, the results from the decentralized systems are very mixed. With no central control, and relying on the behavior of client (user) software, and in Aimster's case, third party software, overall performance can be erratic and a sometimes frustrating ride. Technologically I would claim Kazaa to have the smartest system overall but the reality of the results suggest that Bearshare is the safest bet overall. Its also the system that is most likely to survive even though its performance will likely continue to get worse as it grows. I would keep a close eye on Kazaa - the local computer resource problems must surely be a temporary issue. The result of its present discussions with the record industry will be interesting to see but it seems unlikely that while its architecture makes it difficult to police that it will receive the approval of the record industry. Aimster is a clever system, piggybacking off AOL's Instant Messager and thus having a readymade network to do all the dubious search work for it. However it is a little unreliable at present and it seems right in the line of fire as far as the record industry goes right now. All systems have something unique to offer and provided you take appropriate cautions to maintain your computer's performance, you should find these systems mostly very user-friendly.
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