Lime wire and other gnutella clients work very poorly for me...
 

I thought the problem was my software being old - I had bearshare and it worked very well for a while but lately works very poorly. Most downloads never started no matter how good the host or how many sources there were. Those downloads that did start would go slowly and usually never finish. The problem seemed worse on larger files.

I downloaded limewire to get a more recent client (and with no spyware) and it does the exact same thing. I have a very fast connection (15 mbps) that I don't have trouble with anything else on. I have it configured as T1 because upload is only 2 mbps. I thought maybe the problem was not sharing but I have since turned on file sharing. Often even when I've chosen a four star file with lots of sources I get "need more sources" after a few minutes.

Does anyone know what could be causing this?

Yes, your ISP has installed anti-P2P equipment which restricts the use of P2P apps on their network.

You will find that most, if not all, ISPs have a "fair usage" clause in their contarcts which in practice means that can introduce "bandwidth shaping" techniques on their network without giving you any notice.

Give them a call and find out for sure.


UK Bob

Sometimes I still am able to download fine. Smaller files usually work better or if I leave it on overnight sometimes it will download gigs of movies. It seems very sporadic.

Is there any way around it if this is the case? Bit torrent's work fine for me without any problems at all - very fast.

By the way I have verizon fios and I didn't see any other complaints from other users about p2p functioning poorly when I searched...

No, there really is no way around your ISP installing bandwidth shaping equipment. The behaviour you are experiencing is similar to the one I had when my former ISP, Virgin, installed bandwidth shaping equipment.

One day I good download at great speeds the next I could not download a film clip to save my life. But, I could still download the odd MP3 and my IE downloads were unaffected.

However, your ISP Verizon may be using bandwidth shaping during peak times only, if that is the case you will have to retrict your downloading to overnight only, which is not too bad.

If you check this link you will find some people who believe they are being blocked by Verizon: http://www.gnutellaforums.com/showth...threadid=33712



UK Bob

They say:

There has been a report that Verizon is now blocking port 6346. This is yet to be confirmed as a widespread issue.

I am also experiencing the same connection issues where LW just says "Connecting..." and never does anything more. I've tried all sorts of things mentioned in the posts, and I think maybe verizon is blocking port 6346. Is that possible? I've also tried using proxies to get around that, and it's not working.
What am I to do?? Lime wire was working fine a couple days ago.


But I thought there was a setting in limewire somewhere that allows you to change that?

The only thing you can realistically do is change ISPs.

Maybe you can change the port. Here's a screenshot on how to do that. Tell us what happens after you try that. But remeber. You have to restart LimeWire in the task tray. To do that right click LimeWire and click Exit. Tell us the results when you open LimeWire again.

Oh yeah. The screenshot. lol

Tried that. I really don't get it. Bearshare atleast worked sometimes or the download would start and then die. With limewire I have yet to get a single download start at all even to download 1% slowly....

Any other ideas?

I tried both witht he port fowarding and upnp... no luck.
Now it's always saying "need more sources"