I'm using a G4 with an external DSL modem that uses NAT and other firewall related stuff. I've made the appropriate pinholes, and even at times, disengaged the firewall to make sure that it was not hindering limewire.

I've noticed that when operating as an ultrapeer, my connections will either be primarily incoming, or outgoing. The opposing will usually number less than 4. Regardless of ultrapeer or leaf, most of them are 'one direction'. Maybe I don't understand the incoming, outgoing status, but I would imagine being connected to all incoming clients would hurt the network! Please reply if you understand why.

are you referring to the 'messenges' column in the 'connections' tab?

i don't know exactly what is responsible for incoming outweighing outgoing or vice versa, but it think the following two are related to it.

i think ultrapeers, when talking to leaves, only pass stuff on that is relevant to the leaves, e.g. requests for files that the leaves actually share. since a leaf is not further connected (doesn't act as a hub), it makes no sense to forward messenges that are useless for these leaves.

a leaf sharing a bunch of files is likely to have more incoming than outgoing to its ultrapeers. the outgoing is merely you searches while the incoming is all the searches from the network that your ultrapeers forward to you. concequently, an ultrapeers should have more outgoing than incoming when talking to leaves.

hope that makes sense.

Well, yes, it does make sense. And I appreciate your input. However, I failed to describe the problem, or what I believe to be a problem, appropriately. As an ultrapeer. I connect lets say, roughly 50 users. Half of them are leafs, and half are ultrapeers. Initially about 4 outgoing connections are made. All but 1 drops after 10 minutes or so. At one point in time, it was reversed. All connections but one were outgoing. My question is not as pressing as some others, but I would like to benifit the network as much as possible.

I have another issue with about 50% of my uploads being terminated less than 30% of the way through, with the status "completed". But perhaps this is better addressed to a different thread.

I suppose what I need to know is how my NAT and firewall affect the network. I've made the pinhole for 6346, but I wasn't sure if it was UDP or not. I also force my IP through gnutella, but I'm not sure if that is effective enough. I could disable my firewall all together, the benifits being slim to a Mac user.

firewall/router: from what you describe, you should be fine. make sure limewire is actually set to 6346.

forced IP: if you forward the port, limewire should recognize that and set your IP automatically (if you have force IP on).

ultrapeer in/outgoing: there's another thread on that topic you might wanna read. it's also in the 'connections' section. i think it covers your question.

uploads: since they're happening in chunks, 30% may well be all a user wanted to download from you. that's totally normal.