It Seems To Me...
 

After a week of using Limewire with a cable connection on my Mac a few thoughts occur…

It seems to me that having most of the successful download connections freeze with a "downloading from such and such URL" message, a bit rate of zero, AND a status message that there are dozens of valid alternates, indicates that Limewire has a few unresolved issues.

It seems to me that when the download status shows dozens of valid alternates for a given file it should be impossible to get a message saying the user is Nth in line. You do understand the term "valid," I hope.

It seems to me that with programs like Hotline, Carracho, and others able to handle the firewall problem Limewire would not be knocked out of the box by a firewall. You have noticed that most people with high speed connections have one, and that you can easily download files from many websites with one in place? Hell, my daughter put her music up for downloading at her website, so it's not bleeding-edge technology. And she does it at whatever bandwidth the user can handle, not 20k. Perhaps you should talk to the people who supply SockeToome and FileFone?

It seems to me that when I set my upload speed to unlimited, have greater then a 200k upload bandwidth, and have only one single upload going, the person connected should be able to do better then 27k (my connection is capable of 210k/1600k up/down).

It seems to me that since nearly 90% of all transfers shown on the monitor page have been interrupted, your error recovery protocol sucks.

It seems to me that you should have a long talk with your programmers about making your product usable.

Jay

Mac G3 @ 500 mhz, Comcast cable, OS 9.2.2, Limewire 3.2.2,

Re: It Seems To Me...
 

Actually, limewire does support downloading from behind a firewall, but due to how firewalls work, if you are firewalled (that is if your limewire port cannot accept incoming connections), you cannot download directly from other firewalled users (from others who cannot accept connections). Web servers are accessible, even by firewalled users, because the web server does not have to make a connection to you, you make a connection to it, and the server admin has already punched a hole in their firewall (if they have one set up) to allow connections in for files and content to be served up.

Most Internet service providers rate their bandwidth in kilobits per second and the speeds that limewire displays are in kilobytes per second. There are 8 bits in a byte, so 8 kilobits is 1 kilobyte. That means that your connection's bandwidth, rated in kilobytes, is around 200 kilobytes per second downstream and 26 kilobytes per second upstream.

Transfer interrupted could mean various things as to why a transfer stopped, such as the user who is downloading from you cancelling the file transfer on their end, or they found another available source before they got an active slot in your queue, or are downloading from multiple sources at once and only needed a small part of the file from you (such as 50% of a file from 2 different sources), or it could be caused by limewire receiving no response from the remote downloader during an already in-progress transfer.

In addition, one should note that even if you have an huge upload capacity, no one will every meet that capacity. For instance, a cable user can upload at 20k/s, and a modem user dls from him. He won't dl at 20k/s, but instead will dl at his max dl speed, prolly between 2-5k/s.

>It seems to me that since nearly 90% of all transfers shown on the monitor page have been interrupted, your error recovery protocol sucks.

Hi Jay,

Many of the answers limenut listed are absolutely correct. However, you should also be aware that we know that downloads/uploads can occasionally just disconnect for seemingly no good reason. Because of that, the next LimeWire version will be a little more aggressive in reconnecting to a host it is downloading from if it randomly gets disconnected.

As far as the term 'valid' goes -- it simply means that someone has reported the host having a file. It does not mean the host is able to service any requests. In fact, I have seen 100s of locations all be busy for a single file. The next LimeWire will contain what's called "partial file sharing", so all the people downloading the file can also upload it to others. This should help significantly with the busy/queued problem, especially for larger files.