Originally posted by ElementalDragon
well, for one, half the time my downloads are a lot slower than normal. about 15k or less. also, about 80% of the time when i download a large file, it will download for a while, then say "Searching" forever. i even try searching for the file myself and it shows up.
That's just Kazaa....
At any given time there are millions of people on Kazaa and affiliated P2P networks and all of them are uploading, downloading or both. The problem is, not even half of them share, or if they do, they're sharing crap that nobody wants (because they don't really want to share in the first place).
As a result of this, using 3 million as the magic number, you've got about 2.25 million people trying to download files from about 1 million who are sharing, of which about 750,000 actually have worthwhile files. And of those 750,000 maybe if you're really lucky a couple hundred people have what you want. Of those couple hundred, probably 15-20 have matching files for multi-point downloading. Of those, maybe if you're lucky, 10 have a decent connection (ie: 15k or better) and of those 15-20 probably 5 or less have 30k or better upload -- and guess what, they're busy sending 5 other uploads!
Now, lets take into account all the viruses that are rampant on P2P networks. Also take into consideration that newer versions of Kazaa scan the .DAT files for virii as they are coming in which slows everything down just a hair. And also take in account that if you are downloading Japanese anime, odds are the majority of the people you are downloading from originate from Japan. Not all, but probably a good many. This slows everything down another hair. And then let's take into consideration that you are potentially downloading from idiots that have no business using a computer in the first place (but do b/c someone told them about Kazaa) and their connection is misconfigured or whatnot. And last but not least, don't forget, those you download from can limit outgoing bandwidth.
Still think it is a problem with your version of Kazaa?