Technical differences between Limewire and Limewire pro

[Bart]

The LimeWire website lists serveral differences between the normal version of Limewire and Limewire Pro. This list contains the following interesting items:


Better search results
Turbo-charged download speeds
Connect to more sources

I was wondering how Limewire pro is able to achieve these points. Since it's a peer-to-peer program, it depends on the speed of other peers in the network for its downloading speed. So how does it manage to obtain higher speeds than the original version of Limewire? Is there something built into the open source version of Limewire that makes all clients give "preference" or extra bandwidth to Pro clients? Does Limewire Pro connect to host caches that are unreachable for regular clients? Or do Limewire Pro clients favor eachother, so that Pro users only get higher download speeds from other Pro clients?

As a computer science student, I've been trying to get my head around the justification for the Limewire pro's claims of better quality and higher speeds, and would like to hear the technical reasons for this. All explanations are appreciated.

[Sam]

LimeWire's a p2p program, but it still runs according to a certain set of parameters. The PRO version just tweaks those parameters. The client will look for more search results before stopping a search, connect to more download sources to raise the chances of achieving a higher download speed, and connect to more peers on the network to increase the outdegree a search will have. The basic version & open-source version aren't crippled in any way, nor do they favor a PRO version. The PRO version is just a bit greedier. (Note that if every client on the network acted like PRO, it would be bad.)