Efficient data retrieval in an unstructured peer-to-peer system like Freenet is a challenging problem. In this paper, we study the impact of workload on the performance of Freenet. We find that there is a steep reduction in the hit ratio of document requests with increasing load in Freenet. We show that a slight modification of Freenet’s routing table cache replacement scheme (from LRU to a replacement scheme that enforces clustering in the key space) can significantly improve performance. Our modification is based on intuition from the small-world models and theoretical results by Kleinberg; our replacement scheme forces the routing tables to resemble neighbor relationships in a small-world acquaintance graph––clustering with light randomness. Our simulations show that this new scheme improves the request hit ratio dramatically while keeping the small average hops per successful request comparable to LRU. A simple, highly idealized model of Freenet under clustering with light randomness proves that the expected message delivery time in Freenet is O(log n) if the routing tables satisfy the small-world model and have the size θ(log 2 n).