MP3newswire is reporting a new prototype for Limewire that has been released called Sparky that uses some new techniques to reduce traffic over the Gnutella network. Focused on making a dramatic reduction to broadcast query and ping traffic the new techniques should bring a significant improvement to overall file share performance. If successful, these techniques could find their way to all other Gnutella P2P clients quickly. The alpha version of Sparky uses a special bootstrap server (sparky.limewire.com) to cluster Sparky users together. Users may notice fewer search results compared to production releases of LimeWire and the company offers connect3.gnutellanet.com as an alternate for the auto-connect host list should this becomes a problem. Because Sparky is a prototype, users should be aware it will stop working on October 25, 2001.

Sparky is available for Windows or Linux or Mac.