I must agree with you. I have been using limewire for about 2 months now but mainly as an FSP = File Service Provider and I have had nothing but possitive experiences with the service.

I think that the Limewire Servent is one of the best Gnutella Clones around (personal opinion) for what I use if for.

I have to say that the support is really good. I requested some statistics tracking features and within a sort period of time those features were implemented in exactly the way I has envisioned they would be.

As for the problems most users appear to be having. I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding some people have between problems specifically associated with the nature of the gnutella network and the Servents used to access the network.

a) Gnutella Network Problems are viewed as Limewire Specific Problems.

For instance, the contents of the network are constantly changing due to the networks dynamic nature.

This creates a set of associated problems like;

a) Machines returning results because they were on when they received a query, but not available for download because by the time the list returned to the user who executed the query the machine had left the network.

b) No results - Network horizon too small or non of the machines on the horizon sharing the content matching the query or a machine that forwarded the query has disappeared from the network = the results are routed by to the user via the query path. If the machine is gone then the results can't find there way by to the user who initiated the query.

c) Slow download Speeds / Waiting for Busy - There are not that many people who share content on the network 24x7 so those that do are swamped with download request.

People mis-represent their connection speeds or significantly limit upload bandwidth to around 25% of their hardware upload capacity. For example, if a person has dsl 768/128 (download/upload) and they limit upload speeds to 25% of their upload speed. If one person is uploading a file they will receive a maximum upload speed of about 32Kbps =LimeWire reports in KBs so 4KB. Now, add two people uploading from this host and the numbers are 16Kbps / 2KB so you see where this is going.


d) Leeches - People downloading files but not sharing or re-sharing the stuff they downloaded. If they are sharing see c) for why this continue to be a problem.

So in retrospect the problems I outlined are not necessarily LimeWires fault or even gnutella for that matter but are a result of users not making more possitive contributions to the network.

http://www.leeware.com