I feel the way the number of conections is controled does not make it easy to best ustilise available bandwidth.

it is a problem when too much bandwidth is taken up by conections with too many friends. particulary with asymetric conections as ity then criples available download bandwidth.
(btw i am pleased to se that upload bandwidth cvan be limited independantly of download)

too few friends and u dont find the files u are looking for.

i would assume that the more friends a conection has the more it would load bandwidth. ie. if u have 10 conections with 10 friends i assume it would be the same as 1 freind with 100 conections ?
therefore why not control the number of conections based on total number of freinds.

I have been reading (somewhat old) posts about the discontinuation of the freinds reported by newer clients.

at the moment the list of conections is rather unstable untill u have >50 friends or so - a bit like a chiken and egg situation i gues

therefore it would make sense to just keep ading or removing conections as necesary with no regard to the number of freinds each conection has to keep the bandwidth within some user setable parameter. this would seem to be the best of all worlds.

another improvment might be to regularly change conections so that a much wider of clients can be searched and build up a biger list of available sites to download from.

I assume that each download entry would re-search each new client for a new host to download from.
however it seems that if a download has all its hosts as "unable to conect" it gives up and doesnt seem to look for new sources


Colin.