Phex Optimization Tips

From PhexWiki

I'm a newb to Phex but I think I have learned some great ways to get good results out of Phex. Not all of this may apply to your particular situation and I can't guarantee that any of these will work for you. I just know that I had horrible results and after three days of tinkering I finally have great results. Here's a list of things I changed:

1. It appears that Microsoft (if you're using Windows XP this applies to you, otherwise skip to the next one) has decided to limit the number of consecutive connections to the internet to 10. For most users this is fine but when you have a P2P it can bottleneck things. http://trustyfiles.com/help-sw-xpsp2.php discusses this more in-depth and provides a link to a small utility file which will allow you to edit how many connections you have. I set mine at 100 since the max supported by Phex is 99.

2. Go into the Settings, Options tab in Phex and click on Network. Here you will see various options to change. Change the Max Concurrent Connects to 99. This is the max Phex supports. While here you may as well try changing the Connection Timeout to a higher number. I changed mine to 25 and got a bunch more connects and hits. Perhaps some hosts take longer than 12 seconds to respond? All I know is that it helped.

This might be especially helpful when you are behind a router, because those can delay requests somewhat. Arne 23:18, 17 November 2005 (CET)

3. If you have a broadband connection you can also place checkmarks in both Ultrapeer checkboxes and in the Allow to become an Ultraleaf box. This will give you more connection availability as I noticed that Phex limits your number of connections if you don't have these checked. I guess it may be something along the lines of "Become an Ultrapeer to help others and we'll help you" kind of thing.

More precisely: Your role in the network can then change, but due to the protocol you might not get more results (if you are a leaf, the Ultrapeer performs searches for you). But as of three months before the time of writing, a standard Ultrapeer had about 16 connections (infos by limewire), so if you have more connections, you might well get more search results, but it will also take up some bandwidth (about 3kB/s up and 3kB/s down for 36 UP-connections). Arne 23:26, 17 November 2005 (CET)

4. Now you can change the number of connections you want. in the Ultrapeer Settings change the number of connections to your desried amount. I personally have them set to 30 Ultrapeers, 30 Leaves and 20 Peers. If you didn't check the checkboxes in the previous section you may be limited to how many connections you will actually get. In Leaf Settings the number of Ultrapeer connections is limited to 5.

5. Next, click on the Bandwidth tab. Here you can set your bandwidth. I'd suggest maximizing the total bandwidth and your downloading bandwidth if you are intent on downloading a lot of files (or large ones). If you don't want to waste any outgoing bandwidth you can limit that but I have found that it doesn't make any difference to my connection speed or my download speeds.

It only makes a difference when you are using a modem (i.e: 56k), DSL and ISDN give you full speed mostly regardless of your upload-speed, but if you share and others do, then it will also benefit you, because you download from others who share, and maybe soemone who loads from you then won't download from the source, which has your desired files. Arne 23:26, 17 November 2005 (CET)

6. Now click on the Download tab. Change your Max Download Connections Global to 99. The rest of the numbers you can play with if you'd like. I found that changing the Max download connections per file helped the most. I increased the Push to 60 seconds and decreased the Target Time to 30. It seems to have helped a little.

7. There are two more things which I have done that help greatly. The first is I click on Start Search on the Search screen after the search has completed. I'll do this three times usually and get double, sometimes triple the number of results. The second thing is I make sure to ban Spammers. When you do a search for a file named "Crayon" and you end up with a bunch of results that say "Debbie and her dog do tricks for you (Crayon)" THAT is a spammer. They have some sort of program which edits the name of their files to include your search criteria. Simply click on that file and then click on Ban Host. This has greatly reduced the crap in my searches.

That's it for things I have found which help your downloading speeds and results. As I said before, I can't guarantee they will work for you. I'd recommend trying each one individually to see how much it helped you and if it was even worth it. With time and patience I think that most of these will help improve your Phex experience.

One final note...these tips are here to help your experience. But what if everyone limited their outgoing capabilities? Think of it this way, if everyone optimize their incoming and limited their outgoing we all would have really crappy results no matter what changes we made. So, if you have the bandwidth, you may also want to consider changing the settings in the Sharing tab as well to help everyone have a good experience on Phex.

Mike

Thanks for that great guide, Mike. I took the liberty of adding some comments here and there. I hope you don't mind... Arne 23:26, 17 November 2005 (CET)