I've been using Morpheus and Kazaa on a PC on my network for quite a while with very good results.

I've recently "switched" to a Mac G4 (400Mhz) running OS X 10.2.3 with 320Mb RAM. This Mac runs on the same network which is connected to the internet via an ADSL connection.

I decided to try Limewire but since installing it I have had major problems with very slow downloads (even those showing 4 stars on a T1 connection). I have been unable to download 95% of things that I have tried so far - I keep getting requery's, waiting, messages etc. Very unlike the type of performance I was getting from my PC. I have been running this whilst there is no other traffic or users on my local network

What makes this worse is that I've noticed that Limewire makes everything slow down on my Mac - making running Limewire in the background impossible.

This is a very disappointing experience of the Limewire community.

Has anyone else suffered these problems?

If you have a solution please let me know!

Thanks

Try looking at the Process Viewer and/or the CPU monitor. Chances are, its' chewing up your RAM and processor cycles. I have the same system with 1 gig of RAM, and it hogs a lot of it. The promised version 3 is supposed to improve things a bit, and hopefully Limewire and Java will play nicer together.
Other than loading up on RAM or buying a dual gig processor, I think we are stuck for now.

The problem is that only with Apple's Java LimeWire causes crashes and freezes. I don't know if 3.0 will fix much of those problems, because the LimeWire developers can't do much about memory leaks and inefficiencies in Apple's java implementation.

I know that Apple has a beta version of Java 1.4.1. Have you seen any improvements when testing it? Are we close? Are we in the ballpark? Are we out of luck? What's it going to take to make that happen?

There are a few things that make LimeWire slow and that can be improved. However I don't think anybody has seriously started working on it:

http://www.limewire.org/project/www/performance.htm

It's a document Christopher Rohrs wrote before leaving LimeWire. - I was quite surprised to see, that he left, - he suddenly disappeared from the LimeWire.com site. That means there are only three developers left, working on LimeWire. I think it's definitely time, more open-source developers start working on LimeWire.

I had no idea there was an org. Thanks for pointing us to this information. It sheds some light as to what you folks have to deal with and try to overcome.

Synper,

We all hope that LimeWire gets its act together, but for the time beiing, number of us are using Acquisition 0.74. See

http://www.xlife.org/

Janet

hi there

many thanks for all your answers which i will investigate.

it seems that the solution, if i understand correctly, is to increase my RAM to 1 Gb, buy a dual 1Ghz processor upgrade, invest in a T1 connection and wait for Apple to sort out their version of JAVA.

mmm, don't think the record industry has got much to worry about then!

but then again if there are only 3 engineers working on Limewire - who can be surprised?

if i could help i would but there must be some coders out there who have downloaded and benefitted from open source and limewire in the past. seems to me that if Limewire and products like it are going to succeed in the face of the industrial miltary complex then we'd better get our crap together. of course, everyone likes freebies until they have to pay or contribute then it's often sayonara...

love y'all!

snyper

message to Jannus and anybody else reading this thread:

I checked Acquisition and my initial feedback is that on my combination of hardware and operating system it downloads at least 10 times faster than Limewire and in some cases more than 15 times with no noticeable reduction on my Mac's performance, i.e. i can run it in the background.

all this without having to fart around with all the geek settings that Limewire provides. (sorry guys!)

On this basis I would certainly recommend it to anyone having problems with Limewire on Mac OS X

Thanks for the tip!

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that Acquisition is being written and tweaked by one dedicated guy.
If so, then it's not the number but the focus of the developer(s).