Well it's been almost a week now and I just want to let you know how the latest version is working for me.

I'm not very bright when it comes to a lot of the 'tech talk' so I shall break it down in laymen's terms, and before starting, I will give you all of my specs.

I am running on a G4 1ghz DP, plenty of RAM (1.5ghz), on OSX.2 (Jaguar). I have yet to buy another drive, but for now I have 5.66 gig available on my 80 gig hard drive. I am prone to multitask while running LW becuase with that much RAM I can afford it. I do not use any other peer to peer or fileshring services other than LW mostly because I'm very happy with its performance in the past and I've grown quite fond of the other users' input and feedback on the forums that I see no other reason to switch to something else.

That being said...here's what I've experienced so far, using 2.7.2...


- Install -
Yes, it's true that the install did not remember any of my preferences and I had to reset them (no big deal), but other than that, a painless process.

- Startup -
Startup seems to be fine. I always immediatly open the 'statistics' window on startup to see how many hosts are connected and files available, and I see no dramatic difference in performance during startup. I will say however that I have quit and restarted it multiple times just to see how many downloads might resume on startup and I seem to remember that with 2.6.5, if I had 200 or so requests queued that an average of 3-5 of them would resume on startup and this is not the case with the new version. 1 or 2 if I'm lucky but never over that. I'm assuming that this has something to so with my place in line.

- Performance -
One thing that happened to me using this version (2.7.2) is that if I had uploads and opened up my preferences to give those users more bandwidth, as soon as I clicked on 'ok' I crashed and had to restart. Now this only seems to occur if I change that bandwidth drastically (more than 50%). This happened three times.

My downloads.dat file holds at a steady 48k with three downloads currently in progress.

This new 'waiting in line' feature seems to be an extremely rare occurance. I have only seen 'waiting in line' twice using 2.7.1 and 2 combined. Strangely enough one of those was the very first request I made when I installed 2.7.1 and only one other time, yesterday running the updated version (2.7.2).

Downloads are slower most of the time but, yes it's true, there are those times when I will get files coming in to me at 60kb/sec and that that puts a smile on my face, but nonetheless, I do see a general drop in download speeds.

In addition to download speed, I've noticed a big drop in downloads in general. Much less than usual. I don't think I could even give you any clues as to why this may be so, but I thought you might want to know, since I do basically run LW 24/7, and have been for the past 6 months or so. I have heard that it could be a port connection, that if one changes his/her port to another, that it might help, or by turning off and disabling 'ultrapeer' it might do something too, but until someone tells me firsthand what might be best for me and my system, I'm going to assume this is all myth. I have considered the possibility that most users now consider me a leech because I've already got what I can get from them and I've been cutoff until I can put somethinng in my shared folder that they might want. And there is the issue that my hard drive is almost full with only 5 gig left; could that be something? Whatever the case may be, it seems entirely too coincidental considering the fact that my download speed and frequency has dropped dramaticaly since the instillation of the new beta.

Another issue that came up during performance was that my hosts keep dropping like flies, especially if I had LW running in the background. In fact, I can say that there were four occaisions where I would hide LW, play 'Return To Wolfenstien' for an hour or so, and the when I returned to check LW there were 0 total hosts with maybe 1 download in progress. So then I'm thinking, 'Okay give it a few minutes, perform a search or two and see what happens.' Sorry Charlie, you still have 0 total hosts with 1 current host running. So what do I do? Restart. 2.6.5 seemed to work much better in the background than this later version.

All in all the performance seems a bit slower. Furthermore I uninstalled 2.7.1 when I had it, because that was buggy and reinstalled 2.6.5 and it was like I was still running 2.7.1. I read somewhere that if you uninstall and reinstall Java that it would restore the functionality of 2.6.5, but that was a suggestion for OS 9.2 and I don't know how to uninstall my Java for OSX because I don't have a 'control panel' in OSX. Any feedback on this would be helpful.

Anyway, LW rocks and I'm sure all of these issues are being adressed in some way or another already, but just incase, this is my general update for you which I hope helps a little.


Keep up the good work and thanks for the files,

Daniel

p.s. Will we be expecting a 2.7.3 anytime soon?