I agree, but I don't think this is the fault of phex. I also have gtk-gnutella running on my platform, as I'm doing some porting work for other users who want that program ported to Solaris using the Sun compilers instead of the GNU ones.

Anyway, I see the same behavior in gtk-gnutella, and it appears to be a condition of the network. It can often take hundreds of sources to find even a single one that will accept a connection right away.

It appears that some of the problem may be coming from other G-net client programs, which are refusing connections from non-g2 clients (you know who you are!)

The other reason could be that the defaults for most client programs do not give a large number of connections to others. They default to settings like 2 or 4 connections, which are gobbled up very quickly, as you've seen from your uploads screen.
It may be time to suggest a minimum upload setting that can be selected, perhaps based on the number of download slots.

If the user sets 5 download slots, perhaps the program should force the minimum upload slots to 5 also. Give back what you take, right? But we can't prevent the user from shutting off downloads entirely. They need that option, I think, and would scream if it wasn't there.

What is best is to offer a large number of downloads, and control the traffic by limiting the total bandwidth for uploads. That way, you don't bury your machine in traffic, yet plenty of users can find download slots. If enough people did this, the bandwidth limits would not be punitive, since you could have many sources contributing to a single download, and the overall thruput would be OK.

This is the only suggestion I can give, since it's difficult to make people share files - in fact it's impossible. You can't force people to share. And the greedy ones grab what they want, but won't share back. It's a shame.

Hopefully, as more people get fast connections to the net, it will be less of a problem, if you can find at least one active source for your file. But it really needs to be dealt with, since the problem is common to all G-net client programs. It's a pilot problem, and people need to be given some idea what they are doing to the network.

One thing that could help would be to put a decent FAQ up, that not only explains how the program works, and what the controls do, etc., but also explains why you need to share, and gives some guidelines for the balance between downloads and upload slots, and WHY it needs to be that way.

If every G-net client program provided this, we would have a better network. The problem is that the developers know exactly how the programs work, and how they should be setup to be 'good' net citizens, but they do not tell the users about these things. I have no idea why, maybe they are just too busy making nice programs for us to use.

Regards....