Which is better?

Being connected to 3 ultrapeers


OR

Being connected to 20 peers?

Thanks in advance.

LW automaitcally figures out which is better. A Leaf connects to 3-5 ultrapeers; ultrapeers connect to 30 peers (other ultrapeers) and each UP acts as a relay for up to 30 leafs.

General rule of thumb is that if you are sharing lots of files, you are contributing lots already to the network, and so leaf mode works best. If you are best able to share upstream bandwidth, your LW can best help by passing messages and getting leafs connected, the major job of an Ultrapeer

Both a leaf and UP should get about the same quality of search and download results (though I think an UP might have a bit more of an advantage that's not very noticable).

30 peers equals a search horizon of 300k hosts, 3 ultrapeers allow you to reach about 600k hosts and 5 ultrapeers will allow you to reach 800k hosts on average (everything +/- 20%, of course).

Sometimes it may be a good idea to disable ultrapeer support while searching for rare content.