Ditto. Same experience here. I've spent a couple of hours today trying Gnotella. Everything appears to be configured correctly and working, but it doesn't show me any search results and it doesn't display any uploads even though the Monitor screen shows numerous search hits. Nothing wrong with my cable service - Napster is working fine. Everthing else is okay with my Win98 setup. It must be a problem with Gnotella.

OK, something has tobe done about network congestion. Because as more presure is put on napster more people will be moving to gnutella. If it is indeed network congestion then a better way of routing all this congestion must be figured, since the network will only be gaining more 56k users.

I don't think it's network congestion. I started Gnotella about fifteen minutes ago and put in the search term "stone" and - despite a half-dozen connections showing hundreds of thousands of files - show not a single result on the search page.

I started Gnutella about five minutes ago, put in the same search term, and already show over a hundred items out of just 1,500 files.

Interesting. I've read the complaints on this board posted from several months back and later. I'm using .73 of Gnotella. No matter what I search for.. it'll just sit there saying "Searching..." -- nothing ever pops up. If it were network congestion, wouldn't you think it had cleared up by now? I think we could consider it a bug.

Allow me to correct myself. I did manage to turn up two search results after a good 5 minutes wait. Bug fixed. My bad. http://forums.gnutellanews.com/wink.gif

I also had the same search problems, but properly configured with only 1 search performed at a time, and 0 incoming and 1 outgoing connections with a 56k, I was able to return results on everything I typed in. It also helped to have a minimal amount of programs running at the same time.
Now if only I could download the files, hmmm.
Excruciatingly slow if they even start at all. Gnotella really is ahead of it's time - for my connection anyway.
Think I'll be using Wrapster in the meantime.

I get some search results, but only for super popular bands (ie rolling stones, other crappy stuff). Nothing for indie bands like Superchunk. Is this just because gnotella sucks?

Let's get real....

The technology can't keep up with the hype. Gnotella searching sucks.

Don't get me wrong. Gnotella's nice...when it works.

Better than nothing, right?

From my experience and a little guesstimating as to what is going on, it looks like most users have non-contributory connections (ultra-slow 56k or TTL=1) so once your search hits one of these users, it dies. Their 56K isn't even really 56K as they probably have throughput of 33K which is further cut down by their simultaneous browsing and chatting whilst waiting for gnotella to finish giving search results.

The chance of hitting these users is very significantly high. This may be why you don't get search results returned or why just a few paltry results occur after a long time.

Once in awhile, you will be lucky and make an outgoing connection to a fast user who happens to be serving up a lot of files. Unfortunately, there are all too few actual people serving up files relative to the total number of users.

However, there are so many users trying to download that the file server's site has reached its max number limit of files being uploaded to the net at that time. The normal number is 4, but the site may set that higher. So, this may explain why you find something quickly on a search, but when you click to download, you don't get a file pushed to you.

Lots of greedy sites allow searches but may set the max number of files to 1 or 0. So you also can't get any files from them. Or they have moved the files and didn't bother refreshing.

Selfish users kill the golden goose. I wish there was some way that clients could have a flag that allows/disallows greedy users to connect. Nassssty users should be censored off. Ooops. That brings us back to square zero since gnutellanet wasn't meant to be that way. *sigh*

Hello,
Okay, Gnutella can be a little frustrating but, give yourself some time to learn the ins and outs. The first thing to check is how many hosts do you have. The number of hosts will be in the left corner. I use 5 out going connections and catch about 500 to 900 hosts. Anymore than 5 connections and the program seemed to hang. You need to seed the program to find good hosts. Enter gnutellahosts.com:6346 in the field next to the add and remove buttons. After entering press the add button and you should begin catching hosts. Let me know if I helped or if you need more info.
vfstab