Thread: Great program.
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Old October 19th, 2003
rockkeys rockkeys is offline
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Join Date: September 30th, 2003
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Default yes, how about an answer?

It sure would help if some knowledgeable people would reply to this. Our current situation where noone can find an active source when there are over 300 sources for a file really sucks. And it's because people are greedy of bandwidth, and don't consider how they are affecting the overall network.

We really need each development team for each client program to voice some strong guidelines on the ratios needed to resolve this situation. I do not know the design parameters for the Gnet well enough to give an opinion that might not do harm.

But it's very clear that if you do not offer as many slots for upload as you use for download, the end result will be terrible congestion of the network, in that you will be waiting and waiting to download files. The slots have to come from somewhere, so if you limit your uploads to 2, but commonly download 5 files at a time, we all end up in trouble. Throttle back the bandwidth if you must, but be generous with the upload slots, so that people can get the files they need. Even with slow sources, enough slow sources add up to a very fast aggregate download.

I'm amazed that almost every freely downloadable client has no documentation, doesn't give any guidelines, often doesn't even include installation instructions. This is the responsibility of the developers - to provide enough information to their users, so that they can be good net 'citizens', and do their part to insure that you can find AND download the files you want. They haven't done a very good job of this.

I understand that they are busy just getting the programs working, and I am very appreciative of their efforts, but the job isn't done until the paperwork is done. Don't forget that the users do not have the information that you do about the actual behavior of the Gnet, and have no clue what the settings should be. They accept the defaults, and assume that's fine. But for many users, it's not fine. They load up 25 files for download, and then leave the default upload slots at some low number, and have no idea what that does to the net. Unless you tell them, how will they learn?

Are any developers listening? Are they going to do anything about the abysmal situation we have now? Only time will tell....
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