Wow, Looks like you've hit it!

I was sharing over 2000 files (mostly MAME roms) and Gnotella often ground to a complete halt. I guess Gnotella has some dead slow routines for finding search hits and too many files slows it down.

This fits in with another thing I was seeing. The number of host connections also makes a big difference, but more connections means more searches to respond to.

I also notice the current version includes some sort of database process that runs with Gnotella.exe - I wonder if that was an attempt to speed things up?