Please consider creating a protocol which supports compression. the gnutella network uses a huge amount of bandwidth even when files are not being uploaded or downloaded.

keyword searches, filenames, text files, etc can all be compressed.

when a client connects, check to see if it supports compression before sending out compressed data.

if the amount of data to be sent is not large enough, queue it instead and give it a timeout value of a few seconds. with the large amount of search terms coming in, it is obvious that compression will help.

also compress all outgoing text files. even do binary files... you can determine if a compressed binary file has reduced in size or not, and remember how much compression you get for each file. if the compression is not significant, do not do it on subsequent transfers.