I was getting over 20 hosts on average for three different files I'm downloading. I thought I could be getting better speed and powered down my computer, my airport express wifi router, and my DSL modem.

After powering everything back up and reconnecting, I'm averaging less than 3 hosts for all three files I'm downloading.

Any idea why this would happen?
Or how I can get the number of hosts back up where it was?


Thanks in advance to everyone.

Search for more hosts And use the Get More Results options by right-clicking (control-click mac users) on the search tab.

Chances are you are connected to different ultrapeers & lost that connection with the hosts who had the file. Alternatives would be to close the program occasionally & re-open. Though that may take it either way. Better or worse!

The way the gnutella network works, it very much depends upon which ultrapeers you are connected to. (that's why LW Pro by connecting to 5 ultrapeers instead of Basic's 3 can sometimes be advantageous, though more-so for searching for rarer files.)

Network Horizon: http://www.gnutellaforums.com/genera...ally-work.html

First of all thanks so much.

These are torrents I'm downloading, they don't show up in searches from within Limewire.
"Get More Results" is not an option when I right-click. I'm using Limewire 4.18.8 on an Intel iMac, with ATT DSL and Airport Express router.

I've tried relaunching Limewire a few times, and the host count is sometimes larger. But the download rate stays at 0k, and the remaining time does not display except on one of the files. The other two don't budge.

Any other ideas?

Yeah ... don't use LW for torrents O.o Unfortunately LW is not totally geared properly for full torrent understanding.

I'd recommend Azureus (now called Vuse).

One of the problems is with torrents is some hosts set high share ratio requirements in order to connect to them. LW does not seem to keep any track of ratio of sharing. I'm guessing a lot of people lose out by being filtered out by such high requirement sharers. (I keep my share ratio well over 2 ... meaning more than double uploaded compared to downloaded.)

That at least affects things with connecting to the best of the sharers.

For the rest, it is a wide topic. Torrents are very much partial file sharing. So you were probably downloading at same time as some others who still yet did not have the entire file. Their upload slots might have been taken by others or other shares they have. Patience is best for torrents. I hope that makes sense.

Do you mean files shared, or bandwidth for uploads/downloads in regards to ratio requirement for some sharers?

Thanks for the education. Don't fully understand, but it is helpful.

erm .. bandwidth I guess. For example you download a 100 MB file. You upload it to x amount of people so much that you end up uploading 200 MB of such a file. So your ratio would be 2 on that particular file. As for your overall sharing ratio would depend on how you went with those. My overall ratio is 2.33 at present. If you'd downloaded more than you had uploaded then your share ratio would be less then one; eg: 0.75 (would be 0.5 if you'd uploaded half as much as you'd downloaded.)

I am aware that some people (in their particular torrent program settings) filter out users who have a ratio below 1.0 .. some even a little higher. eg: 1.25 (which would mean overall uploading 25% more than you'd downloaded.) The concept & thinking behind it is they wish to share only with 'true' sharers. Not with leeches who come & take what they want then disappear from the sharing process or from the network. LW seems to miss this point. Not sure how they deal with it. But their default settings are to share 6:4 which means a ratio of 0.66 'if' others are able to connect to them. And of course that's not always the case, especially with LW re: torrents.

Thanks so much!
I'll try to utilize this info in the future.

The end result of my original problem is that the number of hosts eventually came back up. I paused/resumed them a few times, restarted Limewire a few times...which may not have mattered. I guess it just took a while for it to find and establish good connections with many more hosts.

Although, it did seem to pick up a lot once I set my upload speed to maximum, and put a bunch more items in my shared folder.

I guess like with all p2p...patience is usually the remedy.

p.s. I used to limit my upload spead to about 12k. Thinking it would leave more bandwidth for my downloads. I don't think it really changed anything. I was just playing around, trying to get those 2-3 week downloads to go a little faster.