This is my basic understanding of the role of Ultrapeers on the Gnutella Network, correct me if I'm wrong. An Ultrapeer is a host computer running any Gnutella client. This host usually has a high speed Internet connection, and acts as a gateway to the rest of the network. That Ultrapeer you connect to is conneted to 20+ other peers, those peers are connected to other Ultrapeers, and so on. You can clearly see the almost unlimited extent of a network of that sort. That is basically how you get search results, and find the IP of the host machine you want to download from. When you act as an Ultrapeer your bandwidth usage and CPU usage usually go up. If you have the bandwidth to act as an Ultrapeer you should do so. But if you have somewhat limited bandwidth, like me, you may want to disable the option. I hope this helps.

deepblue

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