empty query messages in gnutella ?

[Leon_cloud8]

I am a Purdue graduate student in computer engineering.
I have been doing an experiment in gtk-gnutella and monitoring the
query messages going in the network. I find that significant number
of query messages have a NULL payload after you do the basic string
preprocesisng such as replacing wild characters with whitespace and
removing leading and trailing whitespaces.


I have not been able to find out the cause.


Why should there be so many query messages with empty payload ?

Thanks,
Sunil

 

[Crystal A]

It's probably just urn queries, - queries by SHA1 hash that is put into the search field of a query packet after a leading null byte.

I would just drop them. Broadcastqueries by hash are simply too inefficient to be useful.