I have an 500mhz G3 iBook with macos 10.1 and the newest java update. As far as I can tell, Limewire's network functionality is fine- I've downloaded a few files and their integrity seems to be OK, but that's all that works. There are several serious glitches that make limewire frustrating nearly to the point of unusability. To begin with, there's at least a one-second lag every time I try to do absolutely anything- click in a text box, click one of the four tabs, click search, try to download... anything. Every once in a while every interface element disappears for about two seconds- all that's left is the title bar and the gray-and-white striped background. This seems to be triggered at fairly random times by clicking on any interface element. Whenever a menu or another window overlaps the limewire window it leaves artifacts, and whenever the limewire window overlaps any other window it leaves artifiacts too. Limewire drags the whole system down too- it hasn't caused any crashes yet but it makes the finder and every other application run much much slower than normal and some of the graphics glitches seem to spill over into other apps as well.

I see lots of posts about similar problems and almost no replies from the limewire team. Do you guys plan to tell us what you know about these problems? Is this a problem with limewire or mac's java implementation? When can we expect updates from limewire and/or apple to fix this? Are you going to reply to me or what? I'm not trying to be a dick or anything but you need to understand that if people don't get any information about what the problem is or when we can expect a solution they're not going to wait around and hope a fix comes out at some unspecified time in the future, they're going to go get another company's program. I don't expect you to solve all (or any) of my problems instantly but... how about just a little information??

Thanks for your help-
Marcus Verduchi

Good work. Pretending problems don't exist is a good way to make them go away.

I believe the problems you have are related to java mostly, LimeWire can't do much about it. Version 2.4 brought some increases in performance however (mostly for those who are sharing lots of files). And a serious memory leak was fixed, too.

As soon as a reasonable alternative appears, I'm dropping LimeWire like a bad habit.

I hate being reminded constantly upon launch that with two years of development, this is the best they could do... I SWEAR I could learn Java in 6 months and beat the Hell outta these guys. But unfortunately, programming isn't what I'd call a desirable lifestyle. Too little sunlight, too much sitting.

I can't believe they actually want MONEY for this crap...

One of the many things I don't understand about this dilemma is the following:

If Mac's version of Java is so bad for your program, then W H Y are you building an application around it?

Maybe it's consolation to you to be able to blame it on somebody else, but it still is, after all, your program and decision on what technology to use.

And to tell us that "they" will be better soon avoids the accountability for your poor implementation of an otherwise good idea.

If it doesn't work, you should change your approach.

Would you prefer LimeWire not being available for Mac or LimeWire in Java?

Let me think a minute. Do I prefer a bad program or no program? You know, it's a tough call. If it didn't exist, at least it wouldn't be so annoying.

I believe the correct answer is yes, I want LimeWire to exist and work properly. And the developers should have the pride and accumen to make it happen. Otherwise, maybe they need different developers.

The Mac OS was developed on the fragile underpinnings of the old operating system and taken as far as they possibly could go with it, OS9, and knowing that if any more was added onto its shaky foundation, that the whole thing would crumble.

OS 10 was/is a large risk for Apple, but they KNEW they had to start over in building something solid that they then could develop into a monster OS. No pain, no gain. It was risky for them, and it has been sometimes painful for us. But the eventual result is undeniable. This baby is going to rock.

If LimeWire is trying to build a house upon a defective programming language, where is the wisdom in that?

I gladly paid for the pro version because I WANT them to be successful, but I also expect them to do their part in making this utility functional. Instead, their reply is that they hope that Java gets better. That is W E A K!

Please allow me to take this a little further.
While LimeWire was running, I was trying to download an mpg video file to share. Top speed was between .5kb and 25kb per second. I allow 5 uploads sharing 38 kb bandwidth.
The video was taking forever to download, so I cut off all the file sharers, and quit LimeWire.

The video then increased in speed to an average of 200kb per second.

Do you think that is an acceptable performance hit?

I had to quit the program to be able to effectively download a file I wanted to have and share.
Maybe I am wrong, but I have a problem with that. It negates the purpose of the program, in my mind.

Please, if you can make sense of it for me and the others having problems, I would welcome your views.

I am having the same problems with Limewire as described above. It is the ONLY program i am running at the moment shows has these problems, and it is VERY frustrating.
I am not hugely knowledgable in these areas, but pointing the finger at OS X (which i have no problems with except when Limewire is active) is unacceptable.
Is it normal to have such a large slice of memory allocated to the application? (49 MB in my case)
I think its less than appropriate to provide such a flimsy response.

I haven't figured out how to paste the text from the Terminal in here yet. I wanted to show you folks how much of the Mac resources get chewed up by LimeWire. At some points, it's using 25% of the CPU. It also takes a lot of memory. It's pretty wild statistically compared to other running programs.

In another posting in this section, a user details the procedure to modify the memory usage. He got it from MacAddict, and he and others say it really makes a difference in performance. After seeing the numbers for myself, I can understand why now.

I think I'm going to try it now, but I just wonder why they set it to eat up so much resources if we can then manually change it and have the LimeWire program still run fine and our systems run much better? Why didn't they just either set it lower themselves, or give us a preference setting to do it?