Having multiple Ultrapeer connections may be a temporary change until Ultrapeers become better internally connected. If all of your neighbors are connected to ~50+ hosts, then you need less fanout. However, there is some value in redundancy as we have found. I expect that we will always keep at least 2 Ultrapeer connections.
The question is, how smart do Ultrapeers become from this point on. If they can guarantee the user a good experience then we don't need as much redundancy.

Given that there is a controlled flow of messages between Ultrapeers and leafs, the only real waste with multiple Ultrapeers is connection slots. As always, broadcast messages have to be kept to a minimum. Query reach without broadcasting may be the next main area for innovation.

Hi guys,
just a little question...
As far as I understand the concept, it relys on ultrapeers having a very fast connection. In contrast to the "millions" of normal cable/DSL-users these can only be a few T1-luckys...

Is it really sensible to rely a peer2peer-Network on relatively small number on T1-People. Shouldn't the concept rather base on

1) normal Cable/DSL-users
2) add host-caching to the ones with a big upstream
3) provide ultrapeers to the big connection people
4) use all ways of connecting...if theres an ultrapeer, fine, if not, then continue as previously..

Please let me know, what you think about my (probably unqualified) thoughts !

Now I will try the new beta...keep up the good work

Gucky

Cable/DSL users are ultrapeers its not just T1+ connections.

VTOLfreak: If you would of understood what I was saying when I was said "Most of the time they're "firewalled" users with the private addresses", you wouldnt of made the comment about you can download from firewalled hosts. If you noticed that when you do a search and get results back PRIVATE ADDRESSES are the only addresses that show in red. Because PRIVATE ADDRESSES are not in the public domain (the internet). Meaning, that machine is sitting on some network that the outside world cant see (common sense will tell you, its behind NAT'd/router/firewall machine ) but it still has an outside connection b/c of course its connecting to the gnutella network. Well anyways in all, it means those hosts do not have port forwarding on their gateway or have any idea what their public address (the force ip thing). Even though I have forced my IP, I dont show up in red when people look at their results from me. The PRIVATE ADDRESSES are where PUSH REQUESTS come into play. B/c the push request has to travel back to the host that PRIVATE ADDRESS HOST is connected to and that host could be the max total of 7 hops away. So between you and the PA host that message may get dropped (I'm just explaing push requests as I'm on the subject). Anwyays I wasnt saying you couldnt download from NAT'd hosts. Most people call it "firewalled" hosts aka the private addresses that show up in red in the results. So thats why I clearly said, "firewalled" hosts with private addresses. But truly, I've had a grouped result with 15 sources and all of them were coming from private addresses and that was what I was trying to explain.

Sorry , I know how all this works but I forgot that most people don't even know what NAT is .
And that those same people haven't done anything about it .

that it wrong.
fasttrack's supernode work pretty much same way as limewire's ultrapeer.
fasttrack doesn't have "master" server other than initial server used to start connections..kinda like router4.limewire.com

it's existing in every single client so you can see evenatual benefit of such technology...

I'm loving this beta 2.1.1 ... getting great search results. just wanted to share with you one little bug i've noticed: no matter how many hosts i tell it to connect to, when limewire first starts up, it will only connect to three. i have it set to nine, so i have to highlight the nine at the bottom of the connections pane and type '9' again. then it connects to nine hosts. (i'm using the osx version)

Also another little thing ... chat windows seem to have a hard time staying connected ... this may just have to do with the connections of people trying to chat with me.

Anyway, once again, great job on 2.1.1!

Hi unregistered. Thanks for the feedback. The "3 hosts" issue actually isn't a bug; it's a feature. Leaf nodes try to maintain 3 ultrapeer connections by default, regardless of what you configured. This is really the best thing for the network. However, if you change the number of connections AFTER you become a leaf, LimeWire will heed your request, at least until you disconnect. (We learned from 2.0.x that users really like to be able to fiddle with things.)

Hi LimeWire-Team!

Bought LimeWire Pro and I think this was the best I could have done! Thanks for the best sharing-software ever!

But can't you put a option in the Options-Menu, so that I can choose if I want to connect to only 3 hosts at the start or if I want to connect to as many hosts as I want?
This would be very nice!

Regards from Germany, Torsten!

The LimeWire team set it to 3 as a default. The whole purpose of ultrapeers was to decrease network traffic among low-bandwidth host. The reason they have implemented the "multiple ultrapeer" connection feature is to make assurance you are pretty well connected to a large group of hosts. Before Ultrapeers were not well connected b/c LimeWire was the only client with this techonolgy. This is helping ultrapeers grow among the network. So hopefully other clients such as BearShare, Gnuleus and etc will join in on the ultrapeer connectivity. Then you'll only to have one Ultrapeer connection to be connected to the same amount of hosts as you were with the group when connected to multiple ultrapeers. I come this clears things up.