When i click on the connections tab i only have like 5 or 8 hosts and i remember about a year ago i have like 30 or 40.

And yes i do have a firewall and i tryed to go on limewire without the firewall on and i still have like 4 or 8 hosts.

I go into the Statisics under tools and it says their are total of 259 hosts.

Is their anything im doing wrong or is their just no hosts out there.

This is my question too.
I have been using Limewire for ages and have only ever gotten 5 connections. Yet my friend who only just started using it is getting over 30 connections easily. What gives?

when in leaf mode, you'll only see 3-5 connections.

As an Ultrapeer (that's what leafs connect to), you get 30 connections to other Ultrapeers, and as many as 30 leafs will connect to you.

To be an Ultrapeer (it happens automatically), you need to be able to accept incoming connections, have decent uptime and connection speeds.

Whether you are a leaf or an Ultrapeer doesn't really affect your file transfer speeds or the effectiveness of your searches. The code tries to make sure that it works about the same.

However, since you have to have a good setup in order to be an ultrapeer, that's a good indication your friend's setup is pretty good.

Actually my set up is better than his. The only difference I can see, is he leaves filesharing programs on 24/7 constantly DL. Where as I only leave mine on say one or two hours at a time. I get what I need and then get out.
I get heaps of people DL from me(therefore accept incoming?), my connection is fast(faster than my friends), must be an uptime thing.
Thanks for your response.

Ah. If your upstream bandwidth is pretty full, then LW will probably decide your upstream bandwidth is better used for uploads. Strong uploaders work best as leafs, since being an ultrapeer uses up about 5-8 KB/s, much the same a single upload. It's pretty cool how the code distributes the load around the network: UP's shield the leafs from a lot of message traffic, leafs are freer to handle uploads.

btw--it's easy to check if you can accept incoming. After a few minutes, check the Options->Bug Reports->Example and scroll through to find the line

Received incoming this session: true

It's about a dozen lines after the sample java language bug section ends.

Cheers.

Oh--to the original poster: there are lots of hosts out there--the network found 2 million last week, for example. The part of the statistics that shows hosts is very old and is too unreliable, so to check the actual network size at any time, go to http://www.limewire.com/english/content/netsize.shtml