Introduction. 4

pHoeniX One. 5

Connection. 5

Apply Bandwidth Limits to Overhead+Data. 5

MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit) 6

Send Socket Buffer Size. 6

Quickstart 6

Manage Connections 7

UPnP NAT Support (Universal plug-and-play) 7

Uploads. 8

NAFC (Network Adapter Feedback Control). 8

Control Upload Slots Sharping With NAFC. 9

Upload threshold. 9

Auto U/D Limits 9

Minimum Upload Slots 9

Upload Speed Sense (USS) Configuration. 10

Upload Tweaks. 10

Upload Slot Sharping. 10

Cumulate Bandwidth. 10

Minimize Slots 10

Server 11

Disable Source Exchange Between Clients 11

Don’t Reask Sources After LowID<->HighID. 12

Security. 12

Anti-Corruption. 12

Defeat Corrupted Part 12

Skip Test For CD-Image. 13

Advanced Anti-Leecher Control 13

S.N.A.F.U. V3. 13

Anti-Credit Theft 13

Anti-Friendshare Mods 13

Overshares Before Hiding Chunks 16

Use Smart Selective Chunk Sharing. 16

Multi-Queues Upload. 17

Introduction

The purpose of this little guide is to introduce you to the world of pHoeniX, a modification of the popular eMule P2P-Application. This guide should help you to understand the features integrated into pHoeniX and to make use of them. You will find here mostly basic information. This guide does not cover information about the features of the official client, because there’s already an excellent document waiting for you to get an overview of eMule itself at http://emule-project.net. I recommend new users of eMule to first take a look at the official documentation to have a basic understanding of the official eMule.

There are not explanations for every part of the preferences because they are partly self-explaining and don’t need further explanations in my opinion. From version 1.9 on you can also get assistance through small tooltips, which describe the various features. Just let your mouse stay on a button and the tooltip for button will appear.

Note: This document isn’t finished and probably never will be, so keep an eye on it for updates from time to time.

pHoeniX One

Connections

Apply Bandwidth Limits to Overhead+Data

The download and upload values calculated by eMule show only the traffic that is caused by the transfers itself. eMule is able to calculate the overhead with an option called Show overhead bandwidth which can be found in the preferences under Connection.

This overhead is quite important in order to get the maximum out of your upload. Instead of trying to evaluate the highest possible upload speed you may activate Apply bandwidth limits to overhead+data. This way you don’t have to worry about the overhead caused by eMule because it is already taken into consideration by pHoeniX. Your upload (Show Overhead Bandwidth Limits ... = Data+Overhead) won’t be higher than your connection limit which you’ve set in the preferences. A saturation of the download is much more unlikely as long as you’ve set a reasonable number for the connection limit.

Remember: Don’t set your upload limit higher than ~75% of your upload capacity.

MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit)

MTU defines the largest size of a packet that an interface can transmit without needing to fragment the packet. IP packets larger than the MTU value must go through IP fragmentation procedures which is uneffective. Instead of just using a default value for MTU you may enter an optimized value for your connection. It is possible to calculate the most effective MTU for your PC on http://speedtest.dslreports.com or http://www.speedguide.net.

Send Socket Buffer Size

The data you would like to send to other clients is first stored in a buffer by eMule. You may change the size of the buffer in order that the buffer size suits your needs.

Quickstart

Quickstart allows you to find alot of sources in a short amount of time. You could say that this feature is turning our beloved eMule for a few minutes into a race horse.

You’ve already entered values for „Max Connections/5 sec and for Max Connections in the preferences of the official eMule. All values that you define for Quickstart will override the other settings at the startup of eMule for a few seconds. You may enter other values for the Quickstart but they should be higher than the values in the official eMule.

Quickstart will help you to find sources more quickly but it achieves this in an aggressive way. That’s why this feature deactivates itself after a few seconds after the startup.

Remember: This feature isn’t working with routers. Routers can only handle a small amount of connections. It is likely that Quickstart will crash your router. This feature should be used only with a modem.

Remember: Not every OS supports a high number of connections. Windows 98 (SE) for example will only allow 100 Connections/5 sec. It won’t accept a value higher than 100.

Manage Connections

„Manage Connections dynamically adjusts the connection limit. Manage Connections will check if f.ex. your router is nearly crashing because of too many connection and will then lower the number of connections. A helpful feature for owners of routers who don’t know exactly the specifications of their routers.

UPnP NAT Support (Universal plug-and-play)

UPnP NAT Support checks if you’re connected through a router to the internet. UPnP informs the hardware firewall which ports to open for eMule. If these eMule ports would be blocked you will would have a LowID (firewalled). This can be a disadvantage. If there was no UPnP NAT Support in eMule you would have to open the ports manually. eMule will also send the information to the router that the ports can be blocked again after eMule has been closed.

The Web Interface and Mobile Interface need different ports to work properly. If you don’t need these features you can safely ignore these checkboxes.

With this feature activated eMule will open a random external port if there are open external ports at the router. In a LAN this is quite interesting. It allows you to have the same internal ports f.eg. for two instances of eMule but they will have different external ports.

Remember: Your router needs to be UPnP compatible to make use of this feature.

Uploads

NAFC (Network Adapter Feedback Control)

„NAFC is a dynamic upload system. It measures the traffic on the network adapter level (Ethernet card).

What’s the idea of NAFC?

If all the traffic of the Ethernet chip is only exchanged with the modem, then the network adapter knows exactly of the modem's traffic and can control the upload and download speed and prevent a saturation of the modem.

NAFC has a few advantages over other dynamic upload systems such as USS or SUC:

- It produces no overhead.

- The reaction time is very good.

But there also important disadvantages:

- Not every OS supports this system (F.ex. Win 95)

- If you’re using the Ethernet interface to exchange data with other PC’s in a small network then NAFC won’t work properly. It does not have a 1 to 1 image of the modems traffic. You should switch back to official upload system when you’re uploading data to PC’s in your network.

Control Upload Slots Sharping With NAFC

NAFC will try to control the upload slots of pHoeniX with this option to get the maximum out of your connection limit.

Upload threshold

NAFC will automatically take the same value that you’ve set for the upload connection limit.

Auto U/D Limits

If this feature is activated, NAFC will automatically adjust the upload and download bandwidth limits of eMule. This will prevent a saturation of the down or uploadstream.

Minimum Upload Slots

pHoeniX allows you to set a minimum for the upload slots. The number of upload slots will not fall under the entered number.

Remember: The entered value here will be ignored if you activate Minimize Slots.

Upload Speed Sense (USS) Configuration

USS is uncompatible with some pHoeniX options. USS is actually incompatible with Upload Slot sharping and Auto U/D. More information on USS are to be found here.

Upload Tweaks

Upload Slot Sharping

This feature is designed to get the maximum out of your connection limit. It will open as many upload slots as necessary to achieve the upload bandwidth limit.

Cumulate Bandwidth

„Cumulate Bandwidth will focus the upload speed on one slot. This will result in a quicker chunk depriviation because a chunk is completed earlier.

Minimize Slots

You would like to upload to a smaller number of clients but you would like to do that much faster. Then Minimize Slots is the right feature for you. It will try to lower the number of upload slots.

Remember: „Upload Slot Sharping and „Minimize Slots shouldn’t be activated together because they work totally different to achieve their goals. The activation of both features at the same time would only cause a poor upload performance.

Server

Disable Source Exchange Between Clients

eMule has different ways of finding sources. Apart from Kademlia and Server search there’s Source Exchange. Clients that you’ve found f.ex. through Kademlia will give you their sources for the files you’re searching. This process is called Source Exchange. It’s an effective possibility for finding sources. Unfortunately Source Exchange is quite memory and processor time consuming especially for older PC’s. That’s why it could be wise to disable Source Exchange.

Remember: This feature should only be deactivated for older PC’s which don’t have a lot of ressources.

Don’t Reask Sources After LowID<->HighID

Don’t contact the sources after you’re PC has received another IP.

Security

Anti-Corruption

Defeat Corrupted Part

It can happen that you receive corrupt chunks. eMule will try to repair these chunks with the I.C.H. algorithm. This can be quite memory and processor consuming and the success is not garantueed. Especially if the data was corrupted on purpose it is a waste of time to retrieve this data. There are clients in the ed2k-network who deliberately send corrupted parts. As a countermeasure there’s Defeat Corrupted Part.

Remember: It can happen that a file won’t complete for a long time even though there are sources fort this file. Then it is possible that one chunk of that specific file that’s missing is available but corrupted. Defeat Corrupted Part will not accept this chunk even though I.C.H. can repair it. In this case just deactivate this feature untill you’ve completed that file.

Skip Test For CD-Image

It happens frequently that „Defeat Corrupted Part doesn’t work correctly with CD-Images. That’s why CD-Images won’t complete with Defeat Corrupted Part activated. That’s why you can deactivate the Defeat Corrupted Part test for CD-Images.

Advanced Anti-Leecher Control

S.N.A.F.U. V3

„S.N.A.F.U. V3 analyzes the behaviour of the clients in your upload queue. It achieves this through various methods such as detecting leecher mod-strings f.eg. If there are signs for leeching and other unfair methods S.N.A.F.U. V3 will filter the specific client for some time. This way cheaters will not be able to leech from you.

Anti-Credit Theft

As you may know you can earn credits for uploading data to other clients. These credits will allow you to advance faster in the queue of the client you’ve uploaded data to. In order to identify you as the owner of your credits at the other client you have to show the userhash and another key kombination (http://emule-project.net for more detailed information). The userhash works like an ID.

Unfortunately leecher clients have found a way to steal the userhashes. This allows them to profit from your credits which are gone afterwards. Anti-Credit Theft will prevent this from happening.

Anti-Friendshare Mods

Community Mods identify themselves through strings in the nickname. Very often community members don’t have to wait until they get an upload slot when they’re connected to another community member. There are also mods that upload only to community members. This behaviour breaks basic network rules and should be punished.

Why should this bother you? These Mods are still able to download from but it’s unlikely that you will ever receive data from them. They leech from you. Activate Anti-Friendshare Mods to be sure to upload only to mods who behave correctly.

Backup

pHoeniX gives you the possibility to make backup’s of the important eMule files. These backups can be very handy when eMule crashed and the original files are gone or corrupt.

pHoeniX Rel0ad

Visualization

Invisible Mode

The Invisible Mode allows you to hide pHoeniX for whatsoever reason. Bear in mind that pHoeniX can still be recognized as a process. Other users will also recognize while surfing that a programme is working that needs alot of bandwidth.

Files

Overshares Before Hiding Chunks

This feature is especially interesting for releaser. It allows them to say how many times a chunk should be uploaded. When a chunk has been uploaded as often as specified it will be hidden for other users. This behaviour results in an efficient spreading of chunks in the network.

Use Smart Selective Chunk Sharing

This feature analyzes for every file which chunks are popular in the network and which are rare. It will priorize the rare chunks as long as they are considered rare and upload them more often than popular chunks.

Multi-Queues Upload

Every eMule user has only one queue for all his files. Multi-queue creates now for every file a queue. This gives every file the same chance to be uploaded.

In connection with Reserve one slot for release this can be very effective for releasers. Every file that has release priority is uploaded through a special release slot. This way you can ensure that rare files don’t disappear from the network.

Powershare (PS)

Powershare was designed for releasing files. If one file is being powershared it will be the only file that is being uploaded. Like that a releaser of a new file doesn’t have to unshare all other files to achieve the same behaviour.

PS is a powerful tool but it should be used correctly to avoid problems. That’s why there are several modes in pHoeniX for PS.

Disabled

If PS is deactivaed by default it is still possible to powershare some files in the Shared Files section through the context menu.

Activated

PS is activated by default.

Auto

In this mode pHoeniX will decide itself if there are enough sources around or if the file should be powershared.

Limited

You can set a limit for PS. You can do this also in the Shared Files section. If pHoeniX detects as much complete sources as you’ve entered as limit then it will deactivate PS for that file.