Number of User Count The number of users (also called horizon statistics or number of hosts) can not and has not been accurate for a long time. There are many more users than these numbers would lead you to believe. This is all based on the amount of "pong" traffic and LimeWire and BearShare have been restricting pong traffic for a long time now because it wasted bandwidth. There are 50 to 75 leaf users connected to each UltraPeer and you do not get pongs from them so whatever number you see could be off by a factor of * 50 or more. If you look at the Connection tab, this is why we put ? in the host column. It might be fair to say multiply the statistics view number by 50.
The same is true of the Gnutella statistics on LimeWire.com. We don't crawl leaf nodes (although I believe we started indicating them again with this release) so those numbers also undercount the network. One of the items on our todo list is to report better network statistics but it comes second after better overall functionality.
Thanks
-greg |