I've tried several Gnutella clients and I like Bearshare although it reports that on average about 200-2000 GB online, where as Limewire reports about 80-500 TB... Any ideas?

Are the TTL (time to llive) options all the same?

To true. Have you noticed that most connections and search results are from other 'Bearshare' users?
How strange. Cause there are lots of other gnutella clients out there.
It looks to me like Bearshare actually FILTERS OUT the NON-Bearshare clients.

It helps to spread the product. Just like Microsoft tried and succeeded in 'urging' Windows users to use MS Internet Explorer in various cunning ways (installation was forced onto you, PC crash when you also tried to install Netscape, etc.).

Stay away from Bearshare. It may look nice, work quite well, but it is not P2P anymore. No privacy whatsoever.

You don't mind? Continue using it.

Best gnutella clients as far as I am concerned are:
- GNOTLELLA 0.99 (though I am a bit unsure about the AFileDB.exe being used with it).
- PHEX 0.46 = FAR OUT GREAT. And still being improved.
Bit slow in connecting, but way good the rest.

J

1) That's because 70% of the network is running BearShare

2) BearShare does NOT filter out other clients - this is counter productive.

3) In fact, BearShare FILTERS OUT older versions of BearShare! Any BearShare less than 2.2.0 is rejected by newer versions. Older versions had a bug with "push" messages so I deprecated them.

4) No privacy? What's this, some new bullshiznit?

Sigh. This stupid theme has come up again. When will you learn!

One more thing

Yes, BearShare reports a smaller horizon. Thats because, in an effort to reduce network traffic, BearShare sends less PING messages than other servents.

It also filters out PONGs that have garbage IP addresses and bogus values for the file and shared counts.

Why don't you compare those values to gnutellahosts.com, which has accurate statistics that exclude outliers.

Also, the "FreePeers" horizon is totally inaccurate, since I limited the TTL on those (overly large) binary messages used to support the feature because it was using up too much bandwidth and screwed up the network.