Advantages and weaknesses of P2P networks

In P2P networks, all clients provide resources, which may include bandwidth, storage space, and computing power. As nodes arrive and demand on the system increases, the total capacity of the system also increases. This is not true of a client-server architecture with a fixed set of servers, in which adding more clients could mean slower data transfer for all users.[citation needed]


The distributed nature of P2P networks also increases robustness,[citation needed] and—in pure P2P systems—by enabling peers to find the data without relying on a centralized index server[citation needed]. In the latter case, there is no single point of failure in the system.[citation needed]


As with most network systems, unsecure and unsigned codes may allow remote access to files on a victim's computer or even compromise the entire network.[citation needed] In the past this has happened for example to the FastTrack network when anti P2P companies managed to introduce faked chunks into downloads and downloaded files (mostly mp3 files) were unusable afterwards or even contained malicious code.[citation needed] Consequently, the P2P networks of today have seen an enormous increase of their security and file verification mechanisms. Modern hashing, chunk verification and different encryption methods have made most networks resistant to almost any type of attack, even when major parts of the respective network have been replaced by faked or nonfunctional hosts.


Usually Internet providers (ISPs) do not welcome P2P users in their networks. The reason is that P2P clients tend to increase the traffic. Compared to Web browsing, e-mail or most other uses of the internet, where data is only transferred in short intervals and relative small quantities, P2P consists usually in a relatively heavy use of the internet connection due to the ongoing file transfers and swarm/network coordination packets.

A possible solution to this is called P2P caching, where a ISP stores the part of files most accessed by P2P clients in other to save access to the Internet