That is an illusion. Queueing has no influence on the upstream of a host. You need more luck to get a free slot in a queue but the average time you have to wait for a free download slot remains the same. Sometimes the you may get lucky and get a slot almost immediately, some other times you won't. Since the queueing model doesn't have any influence on the average upstream it doesn't matter for the whole of the network, if you have queueing or not.

Only an hour or two, - which is much too long, IMO.

I would rather call that "normative Kraft des Faktischen" to use a German term. The crowd goes where the crowd goes. It's difficult and not really my goal to convince all those happy eDonkey users to use Gnutella. I could give you more examples where large numbers of users kept using technically inferior networks, just because that's what everyone uses. Fasttrack is just one example, WinMX is another.

Spare me your collection of inappropriat proverbs, please. Your ridiculous claim is totally unbased.

Well, they had to face other problems than eDonkey because Gnutella development was not driven by a single team with a single philosophy, so development was slower, had a slightly different focus and encompassed a lot more experiments. In addition, eDonkey still has an expensive client-server architecture that is kept alive by the community while Gnutella is one of the few networks that can survive completely without servers. Even ultrapeers can operate with less than 10KB/s bandwidth in both directions.

I did not ask you to abandon your religious beliefs but I still tell you, eDonkey is inefficient and produces far too much overhead. With my 128/768 DSL connection I can upload ~10KB/s of real content before my downstream is affected on eDonkey because I don't have enough outgoing bandwidth left to create an insane amount of 5-7 connections per second and keep those hundreds of unused connections open just to stay in some queues. Gnutella doesn't have that kind of overhead.

Lucky you! The chance of downloading a file from ONE host is actually quite high when downloading mp3s because people tend to mess with the mp3-tags, re-encode files, share their own tapes from live concerts which are usually very rare on any network. And I have used eMule regularly, so I know how it is to have a file with one or two sources hanging in your download queue for weeks. Btw, we have had partial-filesharing on Gnutella for a while. The only major vendor who is still working on partial filesharing is BearShare.

On Gnutella you would very likely not even know its there. Most busy hosts don't return search results because it's a waste of bandwidth and all it would achieve would be having them bombarded with download requests which can be quite expensive (a simple TCP connection costs easily 100-200 bytes, sending the request is easily another 100-200 bytes. If you get 5 of those a second like on ed2k, you are bound to see some negative effects concerning the amount of content you effectively upload).

There is no easy way of disadvantaging freeloaders, unless you want to create a market for a specialized freeloader servent.

Just now I am downloading a movie (700MB), from Gnutella. Found 6 sources for my search and I have been downloading it from 2 sources at 20KB/s for two hours now. If you can find a large file on Gnutella at all, you will usually be able to download it, - unless you see the 'RAZA' vendor ID next to the search result.