Maintain a connection to gnutella
 

I am building an appication which will participate in the gnutella network. My first goal is for it to maintain a constant connection to gnutella, like how limewire does.

How does limewire do this, and more importantly, how can i do this??

thankyou

You will find all the answers you need here:

http://rfc-gnutella.sf.net

Sorry I am quite dumb, where in this link is the info about maintaining a connection??

cheers

Look at developer, then version 0.6 (testing).

There you'll find most of which you need.

Some background is also avaible at http://gnufu.net - Gnutella For Users. No Code, just background information on the protocol and its changes.

i know how to connect, the thing is, its very rare that i get a 200 ok message, so i am wondering how programs such as limewire managed to get so many connections, and how they maintain them

They record additional stats about the hosts and always try to connect to those first, which are listed as best hosts.

Examples you might want to use:
-Uptime
-Number of answers received for a query on average (for the last 10 connections or so, because this can change)
-time connected (for the last 10 connections or so)
-number of successful connections
-number of connected hosts
-connection latency (how long it takes to react)
-the region it is from (limewire now can prefer hosts from your own country)


Other things:
-announce what you are sharing. If you are sharing nothing you might have a hard time to connect, see the "allow freeloaders" option (though this code changes quite often).