I'm sorry for sounding stupid, but what exactly is an 'Ultrapeer'? I too have seen it in the Options menu but I didn't want to tamper with it because I didn't know what it was.

An ultrapeer is what leafs connect to, and direct most of the traffic as efficiently as possible.

UP's basically communicate with each other and look after a set of leafs (max 30 in LW).

The UP handle most of the message traffic, and shield the leafs from irrelevant queries, only sending requests to a leaf if they have the file and are likely to be able to deliver it (they're not too busy)

This frees up the leafs from getting flooded with requests that could otherwise clog the system.

You can see your details in the options-> bug reports->view example if you scroll down a bit

Uptime: 2:31
Is Connected: true
Number of Ultrapeer -> Ultrapeer Connections: 24
Number of Ultrapeer -> Leaf Connections: 0
Number of Leaf -> Ultrapeer Connections: 0

If you need more info, I can probably dig up some links. I haven't checked the LW FAQ for a while, but it should give you the basics.

btw-with 2.5 minutes of uptime, a what's new image search with 24 peers and no leafs yet got me 498 results.

So no leafs were needed to get results when running as an ultrapeer.

Some people don't want to be an Ultrapeer. Is it best to be one or not?

Best?

The network relies on up's, and you have to have a good connection to be one.

If you want to leech, don't be an UP, because UP's donate bandwidth for everyone else's searches.

It's best for the network to be an ultrapeer. Without enough Ultrapeers, new users or users with slow or badly configured connections can't get connected or get decent results.

check out http://www.limewire.com/english/content/netsize.shtml

the red line shows the UP's; the green shows all the others.

I'll stick with being an Ultrapeer then. I don't want to be a leech.

If your ISP is Canadian, keep an eye on your bandwith (the LW tools->Statistics->Bandwidth, or maybe your ISP has set up an account page for you).

Some ISP's throttle or cap you monthly limits, and running as an UP 24/7 can use up almost 1GB/day (though the newer versions use less since they don't connect to as many leafs as much).

my ISP limits me to 70GB/month before sending out a notice. You might want to check with yours.

Cheers

Thanks for the warning. I'm with Bell Sympatico and the most time my sister or I have spent on LimeWire is about 4 hours. We don't leave it up and running all day.

I myself run as a UP about 90% of the time. The only time I disable it is when I am doing heavy DL mainly when I m testing betas and trying to see if I can make it freeze or break it somehow. One thing you should know is if you run as a UP and you do not have allot of memory 1gig or more there is a good chance it will slow down your computer. When running in UP mode and DL heavily LW will use about 90MB of memory LW and just about any Java based program has a memory leak it shows up more in UP mode than leaf.

If you occasionally minimize LW it will clear the leak and it will run at around 50MB but it will slowly creep back up to 90MB.
When running in leaf I have yet to see the newer versions get above 65MB. I keep my UL bandwidth set at about 75% of my capability when running in UP the reason for this is if I go above that it will start to slowdown the Internet.

So there are some things to think about when running in UP I run in UP because I have no problems doing so. But if you do not have a mid to top end computer you will see an affect on you computers performance.

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A little common sense goes a long way

Later Grandpa