First of all, I want to say that I really do appreciate what the Limewire team has done. With the demise of Napster, Limewire is by far the best file-sharing program for the Mac, particularly Mac OS X.

But . . . Limewire has always felt slow on my OS X machine. Granted, I am not running the latest and greatest hardware. My machine's a G4/400 with 448 MB RAM running OS X 10.1.2. It's not the fastest machine, but certainly shouldn't be slow. However, I don't think anybody will argue that Limewire is slow on my Mac. Certainly usable, but slow nonetheless. Switching tabs (Search, Monitor, Library, etc.) can take anywhere from 2-4 seconds and the application just overall feels very sluggish.

I've always just attributed this to the fact that Limewire is Java-based. All Java apps are inevitably slower than native code, right? I believed this until today when I decided to load Limewire on my work PC. Now my work PC is pretty fast: P4 1.7 Ghz with 2 GB of RAM. I was expecting it to be faster, but not that much faster. I was in for a rude awakening. Limewire performance on this PC compared to my home Mac was like the difference between night and day. I know that in general, my work PC is faster than my home Mac, but this was ridiculous. I almost couldn't even tell that the Windows Limewire was a Java application. It is a tad slower than native software but overall was incredibly snappy and responsive.

So why is this the case? Is it because Limewire is somehow better tuned for Windows? Is the Windows Limewire not completely Java (has Windows specific hooks)? Is it because Java support on the Mac is poor? Is it because Java runs better on X86 hardware as opposed to the PowerPC? Is it because OS X itself is slow?

Thanks for any insights on this matter.

Roger