On my box, sharing out too many files causes LimeWire 3.2.1 to bog down and eventually die of what looks like CPU starvation. It's definately fine with 6500 files and decidedly otherwise with 7500, so I try to keep it around 7000.

Now, being what I hope is a good gnut, I take care to share files that others have kindly allowed me to download (unless that is they're of very poor quality or fraudlent), and so my shared file collection gradually grows over time.

I've adopted the strategy of removing the most popular downloads in the collection that have been there for more than two weeks on the basis that they're likely to reside elsewhere in the mesh by then. After pruning, the box still uploads at 100% usage with a constantly full queue, but the uploads tend to be spread over a slightly larger proportion of the remaining files. Ergo, more variety but less capacity for 'heavy demand files'.

Can anyone with a better understanding of gnutella than myself can critique and comment. Is this a sensible strategy or is the network better served by culling rare, low-demand files to provide greater capacity for popular ones ?