[Mldonkey-users] FYI: Tuning/Download Rate experiences for beginners

[Axel Hinrichs]

To whom it may concern,

after some weeks of reading mldonkey docs and mailing lists and a very
surprising - and impressive - experience today, I just want to put this
into the mldonkey-users archive. Maybe some others will find it usefull.

I started with mldonkey about a month ago and had a very frustrating start
over. First two weeks I downloaded 2 CDs - about 130MB. But the average
speed was between 0 and 2 KB so the download took that long, that in the
meantime there was 2GB upload traffic. So I startet to search for
configuration and tuning tips.

I found a lot and tried them all - without measurable success. I read
about others and their download rates and went green with envy. Even worse
some of the hints made my downloads stop totally.

In the end - several days ago - I reverted to nearly the default config
(I'm using the 2.02-0 precompiled stable release) and started to accept
the situation. I set the max_hard_upload_rate to a value my traffic-paid
line could stand, set some parameters (eg. max_clients_per_second) even
more conservative than the default and let mldonkey the time it took to
download what I'd chosen.

Today I looked for a very different kind of stuff - software not music but
that doesn't matter - and for my very surprise these 400MB zip went
through the line at an average speed of 60KB. The best rate was 144KB for
about 2 minutes. And that _without_changing_a_single_parameter_!

So here's what I wanted to tell - it's quite tautological, but I found it
wasn't emphasised enough under the above subject line (at least not for
me...):

The maximum download rate you can achieve is exactly the upload rate of
the fellows sharing what you want!!

No tuning tip can help you to break that limit! So be patient! If
everything looks right and still your download rate is at 2KB - like mine
is right now :-(, than maybe it is just because there are only two people
with a free upload-slot and 10KB bandwidth sharing it and 9 others with
you downloading from them... If others are talking about twice your
download rate, than maybe because they're downloading different stuff.

Hope some other will find that "tuning tip" in time.

Greetings,
Axel

PS: Sorry to all of you knowing that long before. Try to smile about the
ex-confused-mldonkey-newbee tale.

--
Axel Hinrichs
h i n r i c h s (a t) b i t s c a p e (d o t) d e