this is a template file.
general:
dl generally depends on your peers.
as a rule of thumb i'd say, if dl is very good, it comes from a chinese sever and the film is jap/nosub or jap/chinese sub. (i'm fond of animes
)
if it comes at moderate speed, it is english dub or sub.
if it dripples, regardless of what you try, it's non-english dub and/or non-english sub.
The reason is the wide-spread use of ADSL e.g. in europe. No matter how fast you _could_ dl, you can only dl what is up'd somewhere. so the overall limit is the lower of ul and dl. be more picky about your upstream bandwidth next time.
many sources for a file do not mean faster download. opposite is sometimes more true. many available sources mean also many peers downloading from those sources. they are all more ahead in each others lists than YOU. they all have huge lists too. whom ever you send a block advances you in his list more rapidly, meaning you may be served after 2 days, not a week. funny, eh?
mac:
dl performance on mac is still overall not good, though usable.
what can you do?
(not only mac!)
1) make shure you got a high id from the connected server.
2) in preferences > connections > Bandwidth limits: set upload to approx. 75% of your bandwidth. don't set it to or near to 100% or to less than 50%. the more you serve the more credits you collect the more early you are served. note: your bandwidth speed is typically expressed in bits/sec, not byte/sec. => divide by 8!
2a) Set slot allocation to at least 3 kB/s. This is the lower limit to serve a full block in less than a hour. Sessions are preempted after an hour (most times) and up'ing incomlete blocks dramatically decreases the seeding speed for blocks. If you don't serve a complete block X to a peer, that peer can't spread it either. If he can't, other peers will think, block X is rare. If they think block X is rare, they will retrieve block X, which you already have and which you are no longer interested in, from other peers, instead of another also available block Y, which you might be eagerly waiting for.
3) on same page: set Max connections to not more than 100. (i don't know what is the preset now, but when i started with amule it was much higher)
4) trim the amount of served files so that you don't get more than 2000 peers waiting in your queue. less is better. each peer waiting regularly talks to you, using bandwidth, potentially hogging now and then. Up'ing at full speed is enough! a huge waiting list is not. If you try to dl a file with many sources, even serving only this single file might already be enough. on the other hand keeping rare stuff available does not hurt, because rare stuff implies rare requests to. But you should increase priority for rare files, so people have a chance to get them in full.
5) keep it running. some peers serve, but only after long waiting times.
5a) keep it running, even if you currently don't dl anything. be nice, reduce the ADSL bottleneck and collect credits. Serve files which are similar to those you might be requesting next, e.g. same series, same genre, so you get preferably credits from peers which might have the stuff you are looking for tomorrow.
thanks for reading.
... m2kio !
