It seems slow connections be it download or upload( if any) will be the death of file trading for us all. Recent rhetoric indicates that "freeloaders" are the prime suspect in the current bandwidth hogging witch hunt, accused of causing inconvienient delays in an otherwise "pain free" file exchange experience. I beg to differ. Without a full understanding of "true" bandwidth and the ability exploit it on a local user level to maximize performance, Gnutella will continue to be an enigma wrapped in a mystery surrounded by a familiar and supposedly benign advertising .exe experimental marketing worm #8162 for us all. I personally am in a 56k situation so utilization of every available bit of my b/w is of utmost concern. I find 3 host connections to be adequite. It seems as though this allows the third to fiddle with time outs and such while the other two are allowed to perform their function uninterupted.The three seem to all stay connected most of the time (once an initial connection and a hopper full of fresh host is established) and I normally enjoy reported network peer #'s above 5000 consistantly. In a perfect world I have 56k both ways. And I do get this performance a lot of the time if I micro-manage the download process. Which brings the question: Is an excessive # of host connections by individual clients be they DSL or 14.4 causing an unnessasary sluggishness in Gnutellas performance? I would point the proverbial finger at the most obvious culprit in the the performance robbing department first at the inability to achive a search return of only files that can be downloaded at that particular moment.(or at least have the greatest potential for success) My point is all our processing power and bandwidth seem to be utilized managing this endless charade of searches coupled with cpu robbing downloads that end in a network error or similar and on to the next attempt. All this combined with the mysteriously slow uploads that occur leaves me wondering who the culprit really is when it comes to sluggish Gnutella performance and what can we do to individually solve this paltry bandwidth delimma besides "sharing files" and not being a "freeloader", which seems to be the present knee-jerk reaction to the present state of affairs. Well any ideas guys?