You can take this all with a grain of salt, but this is my gut reaction as a newbie to eDonkey, eMule, aMule, etc...
Having a software program that you have no upload control over scares the hell out of me.
Having software that 'broadcasts' any and all shared AND incomplete files seems to be a neccessary evil to keep P2P traffic active, but there has to be SOME control left to the user. Having to share even small partial files at speeds three, five, even ten times faster that I can download them just plain seems wrong! Since I still don't have a completed download, I have no idea if this is a legitimate movie trailer or some highly illegal child porn I just broadcast over the net.
I don't think it would be too much to ask to be able to 'park' a partial download, so that incomplete chunk doesn't eat up bandwith every hour of every day with hundreds of file mongers uploading constantly. It may slow down traffic volume, but isn't that a good thing?
Just about every ISP on the planet is set up with bandwith 2x faster for downloading than uploading.
When i first started up tonight by UL/DL ratio was a ridiculous 232 to 1. Half an hour into it, it was still a steep 24 to 1. Now, an hour and a half into the session, it has finally dropped below 10 to 1. That still means for 30 MB of downloading, 300 MB of my (mostly partial) files were uploaded to God knows where. I don't think it is a stretch to limit UL/DL ratios to a reasonable number, like 3-1 or 4-1 either direction. Just tonight I've had over 200 clients, 8 current uploaders, and 72 successful upload sessions, while I STILL cannot complete ONE SINGLE download. I AM a partial file whore!
People are constantly being told to be patient, to wait and speeds will improve.
This is one of the few places on the net I can find the files I'm looking for, so I wait. And wait. And wait.
Phooey! Look at how many times that message is repeated in these forums in one form or another. Doesn't THAT tell you something? Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I like to SHUT DOWN my computer at night, not leave it running un-attended for many days in a row.
Try this visual:
I want to but a cart of groceries at the store. Everyone wants the items I am trying to check out, so they are constantly pestering the checkout girl to ask about prices, and even sample some of the food! Meanwhile I wait. I am hungry, so I am patient and wait for my food to be priced and bagged. How the heck am I supposed to feel if it takes FIVE OR SIX DAYS to get checked out and leave the store?
Now I had a lot of groceries, mind you, and some of them were hard to find and needed repeated price checks. Some of the stuff wasn't on the shelf and I had to wait for the stocker to bring it out from back storage. Even if I couldn't find everything on my list, if these other customers would've stopped pestering the damn checkout girl, I might have been able to get out of there in less than six hours, NOT SIX DAYS!!!
I am sorry if I hurt anyone's feelings or stepped on someone's toes. At least the software works. It does what it is designed to do, and doesn't eat away protected files or crash the system. Bashing Macintosh software designers when I own a Mac is like cutting off my foot because I don't like the smell. I'm glad someone is still developing OS X software - just make is faster, please?
