The connection's options are fundamental to use eMule at his best, maybe the more important ones. Setting this limits wrong can lead to bandwith saturation.

For the ones that aren't into technical data, suffice to say that for the way Internet transfers work, when you are downloading really fast somwthing, a good part of the upload bandwith is taken out. To explain this really quick, your computer has to send an acknowledge “signal” for every pack of data it receives so that the next one can be actually received.

This amount of bandwith “wasted”, that doens't add up to the “real” data transfer, is called overhead.

Unfortunately you have to read all the page to understand which are the correct limits, but I promise it'll get only 5 minutes to do so. Don't give up if it seems too complicated, at the end of the page we'll explain how to let eMule do this calculations itself.

To get to this section you have to click on the Options button and then choosing Connection. You'll get something like the following picture:

In order to compute correctly the bandwith, you can take as a reference the “nominal bandwith” (the one that is written on the contract with your ISP) and divide it for 8. As a practical example: you have 7 MB as download and 384 kb as upload. It means that you have 7000 kb and 384 kb, divide both for 8 and you end up with, respectively, 875 and 48. You can reach AT MOST with eMule these two values, 875 kbyte/sec and 384 kbyte/sec. The normal behaviour in eMule il setting the download unlimited, but you'll have to limit the upload to the 80% of the total available bandwith. This leaves you, for the previous example, with about 38 kbytes/sec in upload.

It would be to easy to stop here and go on: these would be the values only if your ISP would actually give you the nominal bandwith. Often for techinical problems, distance from the first available entry point, etc the REAL bandwith is actually lower than the nominal.

How can you do it? Close all the programs that use internet and go on www.speedtest.net, click on Begin Test and wait for the test to finish. It'll tell you the real bandwith (it's not super-accurate, but it's a real good estimate on that). You should take this as the reference for your calculations (divide both for 8 and set the upload limit to the 80% of the total)

As said before, the download limit is never set to make the most of it (with the 90% of the ADSL limiting the download is not necessary, while for particularly slow connection, such as the mobile ones or the old analogic 56k, it must be set in order to not slow down the normal navigation in internet). This is the reason behind the fact we set for all the next connections the 512 value without limits. Changing this value has the only effect to change the ceiling of the graph in the statistics tab.

As said, you must set the limit to the 80% of the total upload bandwith to not mess with the download bandwith.

So far everything is ok… you can save yourself a headache letting eMule do the math. To do so, set the upload limit to the max of the rela bandwith (move the slider fully to the right) and activate the Upload Speed Sense. No, don't blame me :) … reading all the page to be told in the end that “eMule can do it automatically”…. well, it's not true. To activate it correctly you must insert for the first time some data that you learned to compute until now.

If the Upload Speed Sense doesn't work for you, you can set the limits as explained before and leave it deactivated. Pay attention: with USS activated you're going to loose nothing, but with it activated you can maximize your credits and browse better also if you're downloading fast with eMule. To activate, and to set it, please take a look on the page of the Dynamic Upload

Here the incoming ports that eMule use to talk with the outside world are displayed. These ports need to be open, otherwise you'll end up with having Low ID and Kad Firewalled not exploiting eMule at its best.

Don't rely on the Test Ports function beacause sometime it fails. Give a look instead to My info onm the server tab or on the little icon of the world and the color of the two arrows around it.

If you have Low ID (arrows are not green), usually the problem relies on Firewalls, an/or Routers, that block eMule's communications. Follow the links to set them correctly.

The option Use UPnP to set up ports is needed only if you have a router supporting the UPnP: in this case eMule will open up the ports itself without further manual configuration.

You can use the following table to set them.

These value are set thinking to “normal” computers. If you have an ultra-modern-super-fast computer you can raise that, but please take care that you must raise it a little bit at a time and test the values for a long time. Too high values can lead to yuor computer being slow and/or totally unresponsive.

Autoconnect on startup: eMule will try to connect to servers and kad as soon as started

Reconnect on loss: if the connection is lost, eMule will try automatically to establish a new one

Mostra OverHead: eMule will show on the lower bat, near to the used bandwith, also the bandwith “wasted” on communicating with other clients. Values of the Overhead are indicated between parenthesis

Network: here you can choose networks to connect to. eD2K and Kad are the possible choices, and it's best to keep both active

Wizard: it opens up a Wizard to compute limits and capacities. You can compute it by hand if you read carefully all this page