Hello!

I have a 8Mbit/s VDSL connection and yeat I am "only" able to download at maximum 770Kbit/s and people are able to Upload from me at maximum 580Kbit/s and yeat I have 2Mbit/s available for Uploads. But I am satisfied with the speeds I am getting. Thats because I think that the speed is fast enough and also I want to be nice to other users because users like you and me are monsters to other users. If you where able to download from a T-1 user at your full bandwidth then you alone would be stealing that users complete bandwidth just for yourself and that is not good because other users that also might want to download something from that host will not be able to do so because you are stealing all the available bandwidth just for yourself. How much bandwidth you will be able to take from a user is descided by the Upload slots setting that a individual user has set in his/her client. Generally the fewer upload slots that a user has set in his/her client and the less files that a host have to share on the network the better your download speeds will be from that host and ofcourse the other way around the more uploadslots available and the more files especially popular ones the less bandwidth will be dedicated to each user downloading from that host.

So if you are for instance downloading from a true T-3 User meaning that host has 43Mbit/s available of total bandwidth and that user in his/hers preferences has set to allow the total bandwidth to be allowed for the use on Gnutella and she/he are sharing 1000 files(popular ones) and have 100 available upload slots it is very likely that all of the files will be constantly requested and that almost always around 100 users would be downloading from that host at the same time. This means that you will be allocated a maximum of 430Kbit/s from that user when downloading under those conditions. If you are lucky when downloading and are only one of a few that are currently downloading you will be allocated a greater bandwidth. However I do not think that you will ever even under optimal conditions and you are the only one downloading from that host be allocated as much as your maximum capacity(8Mbit/s). For some reason I think that there are some built in restrictions in LimeWire and other clients. Exactly where the limit is I do not know but my estimate according to my own experience is around 0.77Mbit/s.

One thing though that should be mentioned is if you at the same time are downloading multiple files from different hosts then your Bandwidth will show its true power. I was once able to download 8 files at the same time each with an averege download speed of 390Kbit/s and peaks for each file around 590Kbit/s. So when downloading multiple files the true power of high speed connections will be revealed.

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<img src="http://www.jordysworld.de/emoticons/blob16.gif">Sincerely Joakim Agren!