Connections to other users
 

Question: Why is it that I am only connected to a limited amount of people using Limewire? I know there is more than just a couple of hundred hosts out there. Why is there a restriction of how many people I can connect to? I think it would be more usefull for people to connect to everbody instead of just the people that are using it in their area. Also(I'm on a soap box here), why can't I download something from just one person. Don't get me wrong, Limewire is a good program, but I think it would me more versitile if you could download from one connection or multiple connections. That way you could get ride of the problem of having a bunch of downloads that say "Awating sources". Most people now have some sort of high speed connection and can afford the upload bandwidth. Just my 2 cents.

1. Gnutella works the way that you ask one of those connections and it passes the question on. You are connected to far more than you see. The maximum number of hosts you reach is for a good part limited by the problem that when everyone in the network asks one question per hour and that question reaches everyone (lets assume it reaches a million people), everyone has to cope with a number of questions per hour equal to the number of people in th network. one million questions per hour is about 300 questions every second, and I assume you do want your bandwidth for other things than just being connected to the network.

2. LimeWire can download from just one source, but chances are someone already does or the source has simply gone offline again.
Busy means: Too many other people already download from me.
Need more sources means: The host has likely gone offline again.
Queued means: There are othe rpeople in line before you, but you'll get the file.

You can get more information about the network LimeWire uses here: http://gnufu.net - Gnutella For Users

That clears things up a little, it is a little misleading when I look at the number of hosts/files that are out there. I could have sworn that on the free version that it was showing alot more hosts and files for me to see. I remember at one point it said on the title bar that there was 3M files and terabytes for the size, how did that happen. Any ideas.

How long did you let it run?

Every LimeWire gathers its own statistics of the network, and it naturally only shows, what it found at any time.

When you search, your LimeWire will return approximately 300 results, and most times not more, so when you search for a very popular term, you'll find only a small percentage of the millions of files in the network. When you search for a rare file instead you'll reach a far greater percentage of the network and have a good chance at finding your document.

I usually let it run for a couple of hours at a time. I don't leave my computer on all the time, 2-3 hrs at most.

I just had it on for 5 days, so I can safely assume my host-catcher should be optimized.

By letting it run longer, you help the network as a whole, and when others do the same, you also get a far better filesharing experience by that.

. . . and the title bar only displays an approximation of the netsize (see the tools->statistics->network for more info) when running as an Ultrapeer, not when in leaf mode.

(btw arne--how were the memory stats after 5 days? Did the gui seem sluggish?)

Not quite: I use Acquisition for longterm-usage. It is far less memory intensive (I assume it doesn't load the shared-files into the GUI).

The System was as fast as ever.