Let me take a moment to clear a bit of confusion. Earlier in this thread I mentioned that in order to improve your search and download success you should try to make sure you have a good and open connection to the network. I made several recommendations about how you might go about doing this. Obviously, these statements were made at a time when firewalled users presented a big problem for the network in fact, it was nearly impossible to download from them or get files uploaded when you were also firewalled.


There have been many new developments and features added to limewire to improve this situation. So here's what I know for a fact. If people setup limewire in the way that I had recommended to do so in the past they would effectively filter out all of the firewalled sources when doing searches. This was a configuration which lead to some long running debates regarding the practice. However, it would eliminate the possibility of you trying to download from a firewalled users.


But let's assume that most users today are either firewalled or NATed. As far as limewire is concerned they are all firewalled.

I know for a fact that Firewalled to Firewalled transfers work however for a variety of reasons they also have a high failure rate for example.

If I normally upload 1000 files in one hour when not firewalled.
If I run all of my nodes as VPS (Virtual Private Servers) then the number drops to something like 70-100 uploads. I assume that this is because I don't show up in results where people are filtering out addresses like 172.16.x.x, 10.x.x.x and 192.168.x.x

Hope this helps.

__________________
Lee Evans, President
LeeWare Development
http://www.leeware.com