The Internet has witnessed an explosive increase in popularity of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file-sharing applications during the past few years. As these applications becomes more popular, it becomes increasingly more important to characterize their behavior in order to identify their performance bottlenecks and limitations as well as their impact on the network.

In this paper, we present a measurement study on characteristics of available files in the modern Gnutella system. We developed a new methodology to capture accurate "snapshots" of available files in a large scale P2P system. This methodology was implemented in a parallel crawler that captures the entire overlay topology of the system where each peer in the overlay is annotated with its available files. We have captured tens of snapshots of Gnutella system and conducted three types of analysis on available files: (i) Static analysis, (ii) Topological/Geographical analysis and (iii) Dynamic analysis. Our results reveal several interesting properties of available files in Gnutella that can be leveraged to improve design and evaluations of P2P file-sharing applications.