Shareaza

I did a search for something and started downloading a file with dozens of sources. It showed up as "Pending (3 sources)" or so in the transfers tab. Eventually it started downloading at a piddling 3kb/s. I repeated the search and it found 82 sources for the same file (highlighted in blue in the results list); double clicking it again boosted the number of sources in the transfers tab to a whopping 11 and the download speed by a few more kb/s. Since then it's been intermittently downloading or pending and the number of sources keeps dropping to 10. Double-clicking the search result boosts it back to 11 when this happens.

If the file genuinely has 82 sources Shareaza should be performing much better. If it doesn't, it shouldn't be misreported in the search results as having that many. Either way, there is a bug. Version is 2.5.1.0.

If you use the context menu entry to search for more sources, this should have the same effect (and in fact be even better as the returned sources from that option are most up-to-date, while the sources out of your search might in the moment you re-add them be offline and therefore unreachable.

if you expand the file in the search window you will probably see a user-name followed by "+" and a number. These are alternate download sources available from that user. they are often unverfied or false hosts. see FAQ.Searching on the shareaza wiki

If sources don't have ranges that need they will be removed.

The download speed was nowhere near saturating anything. Anyway my primary concern was with the huge discrepancy in the two reports of the number of sources for the file.

The ranges thing is inapplicable. This behavior was observed right off the bat, before I received any of the file, so at that time any source (which should by definition have at least one chunk of the file) necessarily had a chunk I still needed.

The important thing is that the search gives the number of known possible sources. Some of them will fakes or duplicates or busy or offline or no longer have the file. The actual hits are relatively reliable but they also return the number of alternate sources they know and that is highly unreliable. For example, if you have ten sources that all know each other, they all return 1+9 sources and search will report having found 100 sources. If there were five sources that downloaded the file and then went offline and were known to all current sources, the current sources will return 1+14 for a total of 150 sources. The number of real sources would still be just ten. Often even real sources are busy and you can't connect to them. Also spammers generally report high numbers of alternate sources that don't actually exist to make people more likely to choose their spam.

Then the search feature is broken. It should either actually find the IPs of all these sources and weed out duplicates, then count them, or it should show not 100 but e.g. 10+90.

Busy sources should still be counted on the download tab. They are when there's only one of them; it'll show Pending (1 source) until the source isn't busy, then it will download.

Verifying them would have pretty much the same network load as actually starting the download and be wasted if you decide not to download that particular file. Since it is common for searches to have hundreds of results of which only one or two gets selected this is simply not possible.

Changing the way results are shown was discussed years ago and IIRC the current way was found less complex and easier to understand. One number instead of two that might or might not mean the same in practice. I guess the way to deal with this is to look at results with large source numbers and expand them to see how many actual hits there are. That is what I always do, anyway.

Try "show all sources" in the downloads window/filter.

Shareaza definitely inflates the number of available sources shown in searches. If you use Shareaza 2.3.1.0, you will notice the striking difference; 2.3.1.0 and below had it right. Shareaza 2.4.0.0 and above includes the number of alternate sources, which is the number the client reports, which will be wildly inaccurate. This number can also be spoofed by spam clients very easily. Shareaza should never include alternate sources in the search counts.

The exception to this would be the number of sources reported by eDonkey servers.

Inflating the number of sources falsly is just plain wrong IMO.
Using 2.4 I can sort search results by sources & get a good sorting with the files that have the most multiple sources either at the top or bottom.
Using 2.5 if this is done it puts these single +250 etc. sources at the top of the source list, then depending on the numbers mixes them between the other results which have true multiple sources, which is confusing, makes things harder and not accurate at all.
This should be changed back to how it was