Gnutella Forums - View Single Post - A few things to consider while configuring Limewire for optimal performance...

murasame · #12 (**permalink**) September 17th, 2004

Those are you download and upload bandwidths (respectively). Dividing both by 8 (to have them in Bytes because that's how LW shows them) you get around 185 KB (not Kb; watch out. Kb is for bits, KB is for Bytes) of dld bandwidth and roughly around 45 KB upload bandwidth.
What this means is that, theoretically, you can download from the net (including P2P, but not exclusively) with a 185KB per second and upload to it with a 45KB per second speed (considering an average quality .mp3 song is around 3.5 MB, then you should (again, theoretically) be able to get one in seconds (more like a minute or two).
Since that is all theoretical, in the real world (well, at least the real cyber-world) all kinds of things enter in the equation to mess it up. For example, look at your upload bandwidth: it is nowhere near your dld bandwidth. When dlding from P2P (such as LW) this matter a great deal because one dlds from anoter peer. If you only dld from one peer, and supposing that they aren't uploading to anyone else (meaning that they can give their entire upload bandwidth to you), you will get only speeds around 45KB (if we suppose that thyey have the exact same connection as you), no matter how big your dld bandwidth is.
And that is only one factor. You can add to that the fact that Cable/DSL connections are affected by the distance from the server, or that you won't be able to see absolute "Top Speed" because there are also messages (FTP, HTTP, blah, blah...)being sent to and from the network that eat up a little of your bandwidths, and a whole other mess of crap that affect internet connections (not just P2P).