What is a Leaf
 

I know what a Peer is. What's a Leaf?

Yeah! I've been wondering as well. What is meant by a 'leaf'?

I'm dumb as a brick
 

What is a peer? I sure don't know what a leaf is!

A peer is a another computer on the network.
The standard network system pushed by Microsoft is 'client/server' where the users computers are 'clients' requesting data from a central computer: the 'server'. Alternatively you can have a 'peer-to-peer' as used by Gnutella where all the computers are of equal status and are both clients and servers. So, when you are logged on to Gnutella, your computer is one peer, downloading from, or uploading to, other peers.

A peer can be one of 2 things, depending what mode your client is in.

- If in leaf mode, you're connecting to Ultrapeers that are shielding you from a lot of the common gnutella traffic, Ultrapeers are meant to handle the data more effeciently, since it's usually a client with a good uptime average and connection speed - preventing bottlenecks.
In this mode the Ultrapeers you're connected to show as 'peers' and you should have 0 leafs, since you yourself are one.


IF in Ultrapeer mode, your peers are other Ultrapeers and leafs are the clients connected to you.


What determines what mode you're in? You can alter these settings in options > preferences > network > advanced button.

By default, only clients with a good connection speed and high uptimes, are made eligible to become an Ultrapeer. You can however also force this option.

hope that helps