[Neil]

Originally Posted by jtwn

Thanks Neil, but i've already read that but haven't found much relevant.



Can anybody answer that?

It most certainly does, & if you have a (proper) read of my link you'll see why.

Originally Posted by Robin Walker

If you run a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing system such as KaZaA, Morpheus, Grokster, Gnutella, LimeWire, WinMX, or eDonkey2000, you may expect the following problems unless you make specific configuration changes:

r cable modem connection will be continually hitting the rate cap, leading to apparent poor bandwidth for other applications;
your ping times will look bad; your traceroutes will look bad, even on the very first hop to the local UBR; your online games will show terrible latency; your firewall might detect hundreds or thousands of incoming connection attempts; if your PC is behind a NAT router, the P2P application might not work properly.

As soon as P2P traffic hits the rate cap (especially the upload rate cap), ping times will go through the roof, and other applications will suffer. The general strategy to avoid this is: if the P2P application supports its own internal rate capping, configure the internal rate cap to be substantially less than the cable modem upload rate cap; if it doesn't, make sure that you can totally close down the P2P application when using other critical applications, such as online games; on a low bandwidth cable connection (e.g. 32 kbps upload cap or less), you must turn off SuperNode support.

The P2P application will expect to receive incoming connections from other users. If you run a firewall or a NAT router, you must configure them to accept those connections, otherwise the P2P application might not work properly, and/or your firewall log might be inundated with messages about attempted connections.