Upload / Download Speed Settings

[SquareEgg]

When downloading I have found that some files can take hours due to other hosts upload speed setting.

Some hosts will set there upload speed low so that they have greater bandwidth for download.

To me this totally defeats the whole purpose. If every host has their upload speed low and download speed high, everyone will only be able to download at low speeds as nobody is uploading fast enough.

It would make more sense in my mind at least, to automatically have upload and download set at 50% of the bandwidth on the program and this not be altered, that way everyone can experiance faster downloads.

And also helps the problem of freeloaders as everyone is uploading at higher sppeds.

SquareEgg

[verdyp]

Te problem is in fact more complex: the speed settings in LimeWire allow you to specify only the download speed but not directly the upload speed.

The "cable/DSL" setting assumes a download speed of at least 350kb/s and if you leave the upload speed limit at its 100% default value, this means an upload speed of 350 kb/s too.

However, most home accesses have an assymetric effective speed for uploads (even on cable accesses, because they most often use a shared upload medium).

Now if you think this setting should be set at 50%, you are assuming a maximum upload speed of 175 kbit/s. This is still too fast for too many DSL accesses (for example, in Europe, most DSL accesses are setup with a total upload speed which is 12.5% to 50% of the total download speed, from 128k/64k bps for cheap DSL accesses, to 512k/128k bps, 1M/128k (home users), 1M/256k bps (pro accesses), 2M/512k bps, 4M/512k bps....

The problem comes with 1M/128k and 4M/512k kbps accesses, where the upload speed is 8 times lower than the download speed (12.5%). As a connection will typically work well provided that your limit in your Gnutella servent its upload speed to 80% of the therorical maximum, this means that there are effectively good reasons why users will want to limit te upload speed to 10% of the download speed.

There's in fact no such simple response for that (consider that any attempt to force everyone to share 50% is excessive because most accesses won't even be able to support that upload speed...)

Due to that, LimeWire will perform its own measure of the usable upload bandwidth, to reduce it from its configured default speed. So whatever you set in your options, Limewire will learn and adapt itself to not exceed the effectively usable bandwidth to keep other apps working, and to avoid increasing too much the network latency.

If there's something to suggest to improve the connection, it's to allow users specify their effective upload speed when it is assymetric. This would speed up the determination of the effective maximum upload speed.