Sometimes Limewire pro downloads at 42 Kb/s other days it's 2kb/s or 3kb/s. Right now it's 0 even with 10 hosts. Im confused. Any help?

It could be a variety of reasons , and I'm hoping you have gone through the stickies at the top of the forums as there are quite a few useful articles about getting the best out of Limewire.

Sometimes there are bad files planted onLimewire which quite often are in blocks and purport to come from quite a large number of hosts, often from a T3 sourse and these will sit at zero for ever.

You maybe lucky one day and unlucky the next,

Your isp might have sussed out you are using your connection for p2p and they are trying to curb it.

These are random thoughts that may or may not apply, but try a variety of files from a variety of sourses and see if you can find a pattern.

I hope this, at least, is food for thought.

In short, there a lot of factors that affect your download speed, and without getting a lot more information from you, it's hard to say which factors are coming into play in your case.

At a basic level, you can think of your download as being processed by 3 entities:
1) the peers that already have the file (or parts of it)
2) Internet routers
3) your computer

Your download cannot go any faster than the capacity of the slowest of these entities.

Congestion changes at different hours and days of the week can greatly affect the speed at which routers on the Internet can process information being sent to you. Your ISP may also change "bandwidth shaping" policies on their routers at different times of the day/days of the week.

Different hosts have different upload capacities. One day you may be downloading a file from two lightly-loaded high-capacity peers that can each upload to you at 20 kBytes/s . Some other day, you might be downloading another file from 10 hosts that can each only give you half a kByte/s.

If you're seeing a high variance in download speeds at times of low network congestion, at the same time and day of the week, my best guess is that you're downloading different files from different peers, and some of the files are coming from peers with a lot of spare upload bandwidth, while other files are coming from peers with very little spare upload bandwidth.

If you're running other network-intensive programs on your computer (or on your home network), this may be choaking your bandwidth on your end.


I used to be a computer network simulation consultant. A lot of companies spend a lot of money trying to figure out why their networks are performing badly, or else trying to decide which network upgrade options will perform the best. Large computer networks can be complicated beasts. It may require a lot of data collected from a bunch of differet computers in order to be able to tell you for sure why you're sometimes getting slow downloads.