Conjunction Dysfunction: The Weakness of Conjunctive Queries in Peer-to-Peer File-sharing Systems

Peers in peer-to-peer file-sharing systems use conjunctive queries as a way of controlling query cost in the absence of information about the behavior of other peers. Conjunctive queries are good at increasing the precision of query result sets, but may be overly selective, decreasing overall performance. We consider relaxing the conjunctive matching criterion and its impact on performance and cost. Experimental results indicate that significant performance improvements are possible at reasonable cost