As Stief said, we're already seeing some fantastic performance improvements. Our new exchanging of tables between Ultrapeers means that Ultrapeers now have sparse representations of their neighboring Ultrapeers' files, just as they do their leaves. This change alone has already cut out about 40% of query traffic, leaving more bandwidth for searches for rare files. As more people start to use 2.9.7, you should see this get even better, and 3.0 will further improve performance.

-Adam