Ultrapeers Phex connects to?
 

Anybody noticed with the present version of Phex 3.4.2_116, connects almost only with LW ultrapeers, perhaps the odd FrostWire UP? Birdy pointed this out to me. However I recall a similar discussion a little while back.

1. Will this not but increase the chances of connecting to spammer ultrapeers? And some people may connect 'directly' to spammer ultrapeers. Spammers are generally using LW clients or variations of them.

2. Means most search results will come from both LW & FW users, and many less search results from Phex & other gnutella clients. One of the big reasons I like using Phex is it finds & connects to many more non-LW users in both search results & UP. This is fantastic for finding the harder to find files when finding results from non-LW clients.

3. Any chance of getting Phex back to connecting to more non-LW ultrapeers?

We always try to improve the number of connections to Phex nodes, but its sometime very difficult to predict the results. We tried to push Phex UPs in 3.4.2 but apparently this doesn't mean you will find them.
Unfortunately you can't really reliably test the changes before releasing, you can only guess how it might behave once the new version is used in a larger scale. What seems to work pretty good now is that Phex Leafs find Phex UPs with a good uptime.

Currently we sort all of the Hosts we have. If a new host comes in, the list gets sorted again and the worst host gets dropped.

The sorting works like this:

We first check if the last connection failed or succeeded. If one succeeded and the other failed, the one with the failed connection gets sorted down and ultimately removed from the list if it loses against everyone.

If that check didn't show a difference, we check both hosts, if they are decent Phex' (high uptime). If one is a decent Phex host and the other one isn't, the decent Phex host wins and the other gets sorted down.

After that we compare the daily uptime and if that doesn't bring a difference, the time we last connected sucessfully.

If there is no difference with that we simply compare the GUID (close to random...).

In one sentence: If we have enough decent Phex hosts, Phex always prefers starting a connection to a decent Phex (we'll likely have to adapt this once there are more Phex' in the network, but in the current situation it's optimal). Phex does no preferencing for incoming connections.

-> https://phex.svn.sourceforge.net/svn...omparator.java

I smiled happily when I saw this algorithm for the first time, since it is so simple, yet extremely efficient.

Hi arne_bab,

I was just wondering, because since I installed 3.4.2.116 I haven't seen any connections to a Phex host... it's been mainly LW with the occasional FW & rarely others (I think I saw a GnucDNA a couple of times). Maybe Phex hosts have come & gone while I haven't been watching.

I just thought it was a bit odd, since I always used to connect to Phex UPs first with older versions - even if those UPs were replaced by LW UPs later on.

I think Gregor reduced the usage of the Phex-only GWebCache, so we don't get an initial list of Phexes anymore.

This will only influence hosts which can't immediately connect to the network. When your local host cache is good it's unrelated.

Gregor, please update the phex gwebcache to a more recent version of Beacon Cache II.
Right now you're using v. 0.2.2.1 when v. 0.7.3.1 is the latest.

With the newer version, there are many improvements and additions to the settings.
A big thing I noticed: The very outdated version you're using seems to be connecting to remote caches to test, despite being set to 0 urls to be stored. This issue was fixed in a more recent version.

Also, with the new version comes with an updater script, so that browsing to it will check and auto-update your cache. It will only work though if the installer has first been run, and you've kept update.php and keep_for_updates.php (created by the installer) in the same directory as gwc.php.

Also, you can force a whitelist for the gwebcache for acceptable user-agents for gnutella, so that you don't have to manually modify beacon cache to do so.

Last time I tried to update I ran into tons of problems and it took me hours to resolve them. Thats why I switched back. I will try again to update once I have more time available.

I hope its also possible to disable auto-update or any kind of similar functionality.