I have only been using LW for two months. I have not enjoyed your Indian Summer of easy downloads. For me, a 5% success rate for connection (not downloads) is normal. So let us take your perception as correct (despite trap_laws' defensive dismissal) and ask what has changed. As I understand it, more people with excess bandwidth are now serving as ultrapeers through default. This has applied to me for the last week since upgrading to 2.9.8.

I have casually monitored the connect volumes and, rather than see highly stable traffic, I have found it fluctuating wildly. Why should that be? Although I work on my machine for long periods of time (LW operation does not survive sleep), I have the impression that a reasonably high percentage of users are transient. If even a small percentage of the ultrapeer network are casual, this must be highly disruptive to the routing system of the whole network. Further, I have found that my LW crashes on a fairly regular basis in ultrapeer mode. I suspect that there is a memory problem that slowly builds to a saturation point during each on-line session.

I speculate that the increase in poor connectivity and lost downlaods that you have remarked is due to traffic disruption as a higher percentage of the ultrapeer system is distributed among less stable ultrapeer hosts. It must be a balancing act for the designers/developers. The network cannot grow unless there are sufficient ultrapeers. That some of the new ultrapeers are transient is the price to be paid for overall p2p growth.

My apologies if my speculation is rubbish but I am only slowly coming to understand what may be going on and would value your opinion so that we may all learn.