I am a dedicated user of Limewire. With the latest versions, 2.8.x, you can see long-term statistics on Ultrapeer traffic. The disturbing thing is the high percentages (50-80% ! ! ) of dropped packets on most of them. The Limewire ultrapeers are especially guilty, but the native-Win32 clients (e.g. Bearshare) have their share of probs, too.

Is this the cause of Gnutella's poor reputation for searching?

Also, according to LW.com's network-size statistic, the Gnutella network has been steadily shrinking for more than a year. Are we the last rats on a sinking ship here???