Sorry Konrad, but I have given up.
PHEX 050 is very buggy, at least in my Wi*** setup (56K modem).
V046 used to run very fine indeed, with hopes of a few improvements (connection speed, program display speed etc.).

V0.50 stuffs up some buffers after some time, and no connections are possible any more. Not even when using V046, or other Gnutella clients and the PC has to be rebooted to get Gnutella clients working again (browser still work though).

Other problems seen:
- Can no longer select a bunch of hosts manually and connect (which is quite good in V046).
It seems to now really only like what is specified in Network Setup = Very slow to find good hosts.

- It's hit count in the share window is totally impossible, showing far too many hits than could be possible.

The only improvment, apart from the problems now, seems to be the sorting of the columns, i.e. not having to use the SHIFT key anymore.

But I certainly CANNOT use V0.50 at all! Sorry.

I will continue to use V0.46, as it's 'candidate' features and finding same length filenames is very, very good.

Expected a lot of new this and that, especially cause it became a new version number, from 0.4x to 0.5, but apart from the column sorting, I can see no difference - only new and disastrous problems.

Hope this message will assist as feedback in sorting these probs out and I hope you will continue to improve this really promising Gnutella client (with the help of others).

Kind Regards
JD

I am sorry that it won´t work on your machine any more.

The new version number is clearly justified whaen you take a look at the changelog.

And apart from some problems with Unix-based systems version 0.5.0 really runs a lot more stable on the developer´s machines.

However, Phex definitely is quite ressource-hungry and might cause problems on less powerful computers.

Personally I wouldn´t use it with less then 256MB of RAM (if you want to run it in the background and keep working with other programmes) and a DSL or cable-modem. This might sound pretty much but I am sure within a year almost everyone will own such a machine.

Ok here is my comment about some of your issues.

This sounds Java releated to me. Maybe you are not using the latest J2SE version? Phex has not enough influence on the system to prevent other clients from running. Only if you use the same port for all clients...

I don't know where the problem is since we didn't change anything in this piece of code. But I would like to improve the host selector anyway. Let's see what the other developers are saying about it.

No definitely not ;-) 0.4.6 showed not the real number... it had a bug in this area and also the Phex search strategy changed from AND to OR compare. This is the real count trust me. The best way you try it is to connect just to one host that is running on your local machine. And submit some searches. If you find anything I would be happy if you tell me...

Gregor

Hi Gregor,
Wy is it PHEX 5.0? Shouldn't it be 0.50???

I am having too so many problems with PHEX 5.0 from startup, that I can no longer use this new version. Very sad. Cause I really like (and continue to use) V0.46.

It is not the speed of my computer (300MHz), nor my RAM (64MB), with no other progs. running. Or shouldn't be.

I explain a bit in layterms what happens:

It starts up fine (using the batch file (jre java V1.3).

It looks for hosts, finds some and when connected to one, then goes haywire!
Heaps of data goes out, about 5-6 times more than comes in.
My modem can't handle it and stops data from the PC, just like on a normal file upload.
In a short while I had about 160K going in and 800K going
out!
That was with no searches, no down or uploads!
Only one connection established, one more being tried.

When I killed the established connections, the data flow stopped instantly and it went on looking for more hosts to connect to.

The 'Bytes/Sec' display in the Settings window is also totally upset with outgoing data. It should only display incoming data, but seems to display both, cause it is way to high. Showing >6000bytes/sec, when it is only about 1200 coming in.

The 'haywire' going and huge outgoing data happens on and off.
There are not a real great deal of packets coming in or going out. The numbers displayed on the hosts connected to look very normal and about twice as many come in than go out.

All the above happened with only outgoing connections established, no incoming.

There is on and off blinking hosts in host catcher, the blue line jumping up and down, worse even, when I manually select a number of them and hit 'connect'.

I cannot or don't want to continue trying out searches or downloads, cause the erratic connection behavior occurs and continues on and off even after successfull connections to hosts (2 in my case).

Other problems I had before, like stuffing my internet data flow, buffer running out, slow program reaction etc. became good, after removing all the 'phex...' files in the Windows directory before starting this new version.

I also tried to limit the max. bandwidth in Network setup, but it causes other problems, even in V0.46, like very slow searches with less results.

I will try other versions of PHEX in the future, and hope I still can use them with my present Wi***, 300MHz, 64MB RAM, cause I think it has great potential.
Until then I will use V0.46 and try others (Gnucleus becomes quite sophistated too, but the present V1.32 crashes very easily).

Hope my feedback is seen as help and not criticism.
It mustn't be easy to get these things go on so many different PC setups & operating systems.

Cheers

JD

Be aware that Phex can easily use up to 40MB RAM. Then there is not much left for the system. This can be a critical system configuration.

This doesn't sound unusual. Other clients are sending search requests to you. They are quite small. Your Phex is returning the search results found in your shared files. Since the search engine is now working right in Phex 0.5 it really finds more files and returns this data wich is much more outgoing then incomming. All you can do is reduce the network speed but this is also only making sense if you like to use your connection for other things then Phex.

True... this is still from Furi the original client where Phex is based on... sorry we can't do everything at once.

I also like this jumping blue line. Maybe in one of the next release it will be gone and the host catcher removed. I already have some code for it prepared...

We always have to make a tradeoff between performance, functionality and memory size. Currently memory is the most cheapest resource and most of the time we will go for functionality and performance on the cost of memory. But actually on the 0.5 release we were able to find many memory holes and fixed them. Phex is running at stable memory for days...

Thanks for your feedback. It's always welcome.

Yikes! No wonder people are having trouble. IMHO search terms should be AND'ed - otherwise there's *no* way to narrow results. The network becomes flooded with mostly irrelevent search results. If I search for "Foo Bar 32" I don't want to see results that just have "Foo" or "32" in the filename - this is just wasteful.

As it is, one problem most Gnutella clients have is ignoring small search terms (like the "32" above). The idea may be to supress "greedy" searches, but when combined with other more specific terms, it should narrow results instead. As it is now, If I search for, say, episode 23 of a video, it's impossible to narrow the search - instead I'll usually get anything with the show's title and the number is ignored.

The goal should be to reduce search traffic not increase it. Those times when you really do want an OR, just do multiple searches - it would actually generate less traffic than if every peer assumes OR by default.

Actually you are right...
I'll change it right away... it's no big deal. We just reworked the search thing completly cause there were also other problems and maybe haven't thought about it enough...

Actually you are right...
I'll change it right away... it's no big deal. We just reworked the search thing completly cause there were also other problems and maybe haven't thought about it enough...