This paper emphasizes that instead of long-term availability and reliability, the short-term session durability analysis will
greatly impact the design of the real large-scale Peer-to-Peer storage system. In this paper, we use a Markov chain to model
the session durability, and then derive the session durability probability distribution. Subsequently, we show the difference
between our analysis and the traditionalMean Time to Failure (MTTF) analysis, from which we conclude that the misuse of MTTF analysis will greatly mislead our understanding of the session
durability. We further show the impact of session durability analysis on the real system design. To our best knowledge, this
is the first time ever to discuss the effects of session durability in large-scale Peer-to-Peer storage system.
This work is supported by National Grand Fundamental Research 973 program of China under Grant No.2004CB318204, National Natural
Science Foundation of China under Grant No.90412008.