Hi,

Morpheus drops LimeWire hostcounts, so the network horizon statistic you are observing is wrong. It is especially wrong if you are connected to all morpheus ultrapeers.

Avi

So many morpheus UP is not really a problem in the program, there are that many because morpheus holds the largest user base. The problem is that some of their childs don't share that many files, maybe because they are on slow connections.
But the problem is not the Ultrapeers, I saw that each one of those has at least 200 childs. You can see this by browsing the network (a gnucleus feature), if you want to see it, just open your browser and type http://{morpheus client ip}:6346, you will see that most of them have lots of childs, and are well connected to other ultrapeers.

I browsed through the morpheus ultrapeers via http and the average number of child nodes was about 50-60. That isn't great but it's good enough.

Again, the point is NOT the accuracy of the number of hosts indicated or how a Morpheus UP does or does not return that info. to its children/leaves.

Also, since all flavors of Gnutella client can connect to Morpheus UP's, then it doesn't matter in this regard whether a lot of Morpheus users don't share files. They will also be connecting to LW ultrapeers. You can deal with them, at least as far as your own sharing is concern, with your filters.

The point is how Morpheus behaves as an ultrapeer versus Limewire. It is as simple as this: if you have Limewire UP's, you get more hits. If you have a lot of Morpheus UP's you get less. And if you have Gnucleus UP's you get the least.

It DOES matter if Morpheus users don't share files. Each Ultrapeer can handle only so many leaf nodes. Whether you're a leaf node or an Ultrapeer, you still have a horizon within the net. There are a finite number of nodes within your horizon. The more of those nodes that aren't sharing, the less you're going to see.

Assume for the moment that most of the people using LimeWire understand the point of P2P (i.e. they share), and most of the people using Morpheus really don't get it. Before Morpheus switched to gnutella, you had mostly people who were sharing. You connect to a LimeWire Ultrapeer and most of the other leaf nodes attached to that UP are sharing, and most of the leaf nodes attached to the other UPs are sharing. Your horizon was still the same and you still had the same number of nodes within that horizon (possibly even less given that there were fewer people participating), but almost everyone you could see was sharing something. That translated into lots of successful searches.

Today you've got two million Morpheus users, most of whom, at least for the sake of this argument, are not sharing. Prior to the Morpheus invasion it appears there were an average of 50,000 to 75,000 clients online. Following the invasion the average number of clients shot up to about 250,000. Doing the math, that gives us about 175,000 Morpheus users, or 70% of the total clients. So, take what used to be a target-rich environment within your horizon and replace 65% (assuming at least some of the Morpheus clients are sharing) of the clients with leeches, and that automatically translates into 65% fewer search hits.

Just to be sure I've bludgeoned home the point, let's try an analogy. Suppose you're in an apple orchard with trees planted at regular intervals in all directions. You're securely tethered to a tree in the middle of the orchard. The tether is just long enough that you can reach seven trees away from the one to which you are secured. All the trees around you are healthy and full of fruit. Now, imagine the same scenario, except two-thirds of the trees around you have no fruit at all. I ask you, in which scenario are you most likely to not go hungry?

The problem isn't with stopping the leeches from downloading. The problem is that they're taking up space that used to be occupied by clients who shared.

I believe there is a very simple solution. Let's ask the developers to group LimeWire nodes together closely.

If LimeWire's leaf nodes were to connect to LimeWire ultrapeers only and four of six connections of LimeWire ultrapeers were to other LimeWire ultrapeers many of our problems were solved.

It'd really be a very simple task, - just adding three or four lines to the source code and it is done.

Anybody remember the days of v1.7? I could run 14 lines and 10000 hosts and get around 1000 results when i searched for most things i like (even with category filters). now when i search for things like digitized video i am lucky if i get 10 good results even close to what i asked for (not counting PORN)

Yes, ultimately it matters whether Morpheus users share files now that it has become a Gnutella client. This fact, however, is not directly connected to how Morpheus performs as an ultrapeer now that it's here. Non-sharing users are also connecting to LW ultrapeers and contribute to the degradation of the network generally. Yet even with this state of affairs, LW performs better as an ultrapeer than Morpheus.

BTW, if hardly anyone shared on the old Morpheus network, what on earth was the incentive for the people who did?

There wasn't much tangible incentive for people to share. There was endless discussion about it, some pro, some con, but they never did add a leech filter. If you were concerned about the leeches, the best you could do was a reverse lookup on clients downloading from you and manually delete the ones who weren't sharing (enough to satisfy your sensibilities). The problem was the software was quite good at automatically restarting an interrupted download, so unless you had lots of people trying to download from you, the leech would be right back downloading again.

As far as why anyone shared, I'm sure the reasons are quite varied. Some people just wanted to make the whole thing work and realized that required some decent file sources. Some had delusions of altruism. I suspect most simply realized it was fair that they share at least what they'd downloaded from others.

http://mitglied.lycos.de/mdsgeist/LimeWire.zip

LimeWire version with the added ability to block gnutella connections to certain vendors.

If you don't want to connect to Morpheus anymore, this will solve your problems, because it has an option to disallow certain vendors from creating to you by allowing you to specify strings that will be matched against any servents user agent.