Can someone help me understand Connections Tab?

[rutro]

Hi
Can anyone help a newbie who is confused with the Connections Tab ?
I've attached a pic (see my following post) of the way my Connections Tab appears when I'm connected....
Does this look correct / normal to everyone?

I of course wish to configure my connections for the fastest, most result producing sessions of LimeWire.

My questions are:
1) The Hosts column always shows "?" for each connection... Why don't I ever see a number here?

2) Should I have more than 3 active connections? Even though I've told LimeWire to keep approx. 4 active, I never see more than 3?

3) I've been told the Messages column should always show a significantly higher I number for each I/O ratio. Is this correct?

4) Should Status column always show Outgoing ?

5) What criteria should I use to determine and remove a sluggish connection? Are there certain P2P Clients (Vendor column) that I should consider less efficient, and remove them when I notice them?

6) All connections have a protocol of Ultrapeer... I'm not sure exactly what that means?

In addition to these questions, any other connection performance tweak suggestions would be much appreciated.

F.Y.I. I'm running LimeWire on a P4-2.5 GHz processor, Win XP Prof with 1024 MB.

Thanks in advance for your help.

[rutro]

Let me try the attachment again for my prior post.....

[Treatid]

1. Because you are a client of an ultrapeer - the ultrapeers do not report the number of hosts to clients.

2. The number of active connections depends on your bandwidth - each connections takes up some bandwidth. Ideally, you want more connections while you are searching and fewer if you are downloading (although LimeWire does occasional autosearches for new hosts while you are downloading). However, whatever figure you put in there - LimeWire always defaults to 3 when you start up - you must manually modify this after startup to increase it (this is a feature, not a bug).

3. I guess - but more important is the rate of increase - a greater rate of increase indicates a more active connection - except the Morpheus ultrapeers do less reporting - so they can provide good search results with less I/O (I/O stands for Input/Output).

4. It doesn't have to - but since you are a client connecting to an ultrapeer, it almost always will (ultrapeers do not look for new clients).

5. There have been vociferous arguments over this. You are probably best of deciding for yourself - notice when you have a good connection (search results) and note what clients are connected. Similarly for bad connections. In my opinion - there are no particularly bad clients. I will occassionally prune an ultrapeer if it is a very old version or if the I/O is very low compared with a client of the same type (remember - LimeWire does more reporting than morpheus - so will, on average, have greater I/O - for the same quality of searches).

6. Ultrapeers are large bandwidth clients that shield low bandwidth clients from some of the overhead of running the network.

General - read all of the LimeWire forums for as far back as you can stand. You'll get a good overview of LimeWire and the gnutella network. There are any number of tips and tricks that may be useful for the way you use LimeWire (Using LimeWire to download video is often quite a different experience to downloading audio which is different to programs).

Mark

[rutro]

Thanks very much Mark for taking the time to comment on each of the items in my post.... you've been very helpful to clear up some of my confusion, I now feel more comfortable about running LimeWire and interacting with the network.

Thanks again