WSHR/LW5’s upload logic is bugged. Since early in year I’ve been using fibre instead of ADSL.

(i) If I increase upload slots beyond 5, the upload speeds become chaotic. So chaotic that downloaders often drop off. By chaotic I mean the speeds rapidly fluctuate between zero to high speeds every second or two. This appears triggered when there actually are more than 5 uploads. So this is definitely a bug & not anything to do with my bandwidth capabilities after all.


5 snapshots over 19 seconds. Not ideal to show how chaotic it actually is. Each up-speed change occurs at a rate of 0.5 to 2 secs. Also this example does not show uploads dropping off. When that happens it’s the ones at zero up-speed. Ideally I should have screen video-recorded this over 3 to 5 seconds. This occasion had up slots set to 7. Generally the up-speed bandwidth changes are much more dramatic, such as from 0 to 120 to 30 to 0, etc. within just a couple of seconds. I had only just started WSHR on this occasion after a router reboot.

(ii) Another side effect of the upload logic bug(s) is if there is a greedy host. That then causes upload bandwidth to vanish into overhead. ie: The total upload bandwidth will show maximum allocated but what the downloaders are able to utilise is a fraction of that. It hampers the speeds available to the downloaders, slowing them down. This generally lasts between 45 to 90 minutes before slowly going back to normal.

(-from 2015-)

(-from 2017-)

The same issue reported July 29th, 2011 here http://www.gnutellaforums.com/gettin...tml#post364493 post titled: 'The Down-sides of LimeWire 5 / LPE - the super-bugs !' from paragraph starting with “The total of upload bandwidth at times either leaks or giving incorrect figures. …” onward. It also seems to affect the queuing process, ie: queued downloads that should have timed into starting to download are left in the queue for longer periods. (Ignore dates on the images, due to a forum crash & backup corruption needed to be re-uploaded in 2014. Original upload bug images dated 12 Dec 2011 & 6 April 2012.)

(iii) If you recall, the other upload bug I was able to overcome when I increased both the individual & overall queueing totals. That upload bug was generally initiated by a greedy host. Then other hosts whom only wanted to download a single file would either have their download stopped or refused & be auto-banned for an hour or longer (this happened to hosts of all modern clients.) ie: the program's auto-banning of a greedy host would spill across & affect one or more other download hosts.
This change most likely also fixed the 'Invalid Request' bug. Something I have very rarely seen since.

I don’t know which is worse, WSHR’s upload bugs or Phex’s 2+ slot bug. If set Phex to more than 1 slot it becomes unlimited. I certainly don’t want 50+ uploads at once. Start of this decade I told Phex dev about this but he seemed disinterested in fixing it. From memory LW4’s upload controls worked flawlessly & gave the sharer much more control over their uploads. (I used LW4 for 7 years after skipping LW3) Whilst I said flawlessly, there could always be the issue of a host stealing most of the bandwidth but that can happen with LW5/WSHR (there are a number of reasons this might happen, not just more hops or bad hops relaying to a specific host.)