I've been sitting here for the last 10 minutes or so with Limewire 4.0.8 running under OS X 10.3.5 with the latest Java update installed.

I've watched in Activity Monitor as the "Real Memory" value has increased from about 95Mb at launch to 116.5 at the moment.

I first noticed this when my system was reacting slowly and I found 5 swap files were created on a machine with 1.5GB of RAM. When I looked at the process list LW was consuming 684MB of Real Memory and had reserved over 1GB of virtual memory.

In just the time I've been typing and cross posting the Real Memory usage has climbed to 117.95 MB.

You made an important point so please xcuse this. Just a joke: There's nothing worse than a leaky boat. If you need any help plugging the hole let us know. (Lots of exp.) At worst we'll send out some rescue/tug boats. We'll post you some bandages hope u get them in time.
Let's not forget our other processes going on without realising what we're doing. Most app, every process, every key generally stores virtually & * memory. Every other action only adds to it. ***edited*** enough. What's this donkey saying, what am I saying eehorrr!

I've been experiencing big time memory leaks with limewire, even 4.2.6
I'm on Panther 10.3.7 and 1.25MB of RAM, although I had only 768MB until recently.
The real memory consumption keeps gradually increasing over time, and the virtual memory takes really huge proportions, until a crash occurs after several hours.
Even if nothing much is going on, no new searches, no new transfers, it only takes a while longer to crash, but it always ends up crashing.
I transfer few big files (over 100MB a piece), from only one source overseas, who unfortunately is on modem, so it takes forever to transfer, forcing me to leave LW running 24hours a day, so it always needs to be restarted.
I've watched the virtual memory consumption go sky high, such as over 5gigs, although lately it's been crashing well before that, before it even gets to about 2gigs.
Running new searches and adding new transfers, or even just triggering existing searches or existing transfers to resume, accelerates the memory consumption.
LW is a very messy hog with memory and it doesn't seem to know how to clean up after its processes. Most of the time, the number of threads stays around 150 and can reach into the mid 200s, even with little action going on.

Yes--it's a big problem with Java on OS X, and has been for quite a while. It doesn't look like there will be a fix before the next release (4.4, probably).

Despite the efforts of many experts, no end is in sight. See http://www.gnutellaforums.com/showth...threadid=29871 and many of the beta release discussions for more info.

There are some tricks to arresting the VM growth, but they are inconsistent. The easiest is to hide LimeWire. Others are to turn off some of the view options (like Library, Monitor, and Connections).

Diabling Ultrapeer capabilities should also help minimize memory use.

If you have any more tricks, please post what might work.

I can't believe I posted that silly remark above. Another silly moment. oh well.

LW can also be cpu instensive. eg: If I'm converting a video using Final Cut Pro, all other apps tend to run slowly. Including browsers, etc. But if I'm running LW at the same time, it slows FCP down quite condsiderably. It competes with LW for cpu & tends to use between 50 to 70% of cpu. And fcp gets the remainder. That shouldn't happen. I'd rather LW run slowly than fcp when it's doing particularly important things. It forces a video to take up to twice as long to convert than it should. So rather than 16 to 28 hours you can multiply that by two. So now I'd prefer LW simply not to run at the same time during these times.