I just purchased LimeWire Pro after being away from it for a couple of years. This new-to-me ability to download a file from several sources really does speed up downloads. It's amazing!

Unfortunately, Limewire also now goes through a couple of extra steps that completely offsets the speed gains of downloading from several sources. After the download is complete, Limewire then goes through the lenghty process of verifying file contents. Judging from my DSL modem lights, this step involves downloading the file all over again.

Then, the next step in downloading a file ionvolves "saving a file". This seems to require yet more internet traffic.

All told after all the verifying and saving, I think the old version of Limewire was faster, since it didn't include the extra steps of verifying and saving.

The first file I downloaded with this new version of LW was an mp3 file. I didn't know about the extra steps that hadn't yet started and I played the mp3 file before all the verifying and saving. The file played just fine. Is there a way, and if there isn't, there should be, to turn off all that verifying and saving?

Thank you!

The steps that say "Verifying File" and "Saving File" are really just more information for users. It used to continue to say downloading at 100% complete, but that was very confusing to many people, as it would wait at that state for a long time while internally it really was verifying and saving. There is no internet traffic going on during those states, but there is a bit of processor intensive verification going on, to ensure that the file you downloaded is exactly the file you expected to get. If even a single bit is off, LimeWire will notify you that the download is corrupted.

Mmm...since I've never been notified that a download is corrupt, that means all my downloads have been perfect...I don't seem to need the verifying & saving. If I had a choice I'd turn it off. Most of my downloads have taken less than 5 minutes, but the verifying & saving can add a half hour to the process on my admittedly slow Mac. I'd rather take my chances with the odd single bit being off.

Verifying should not take that long! Are you on OS 9? When I booted into OS 9.2.2 a few days ago, files were taking far longer to hash than I'd seen before (about 20 minutes for 300 MB on a G3 iBook). Might be a bug, so more details would be good to send to bugs@limewire.com

Yep. A 7600/132 OS 9.1, the latest and last my machine can run.

Maybe it's a bug, but you've seen it. The files I download are hardly ever over 10MB. The verifying and the saving together takes at least 4 times as long as the actual download took.

I haven't defragged the OS 9 partition for a long tme, and wondered if that might be a factor, since the disk is fairly full (I keep forgetting about contiguous space, which doesn't seem to be an issue on OSX). How's your situation with fragmentation and free space?

Anyway, if it's a bug, Sam will find it. I hadn't noticed any thing to suggest the hashing/verifying code had changed, so I'm still mulling over the disk space issue, which would be a pain since I'll have to burn a bootable repair disk.

Limewire is running off and saving to a 75GB Firewire drive with 74GB free. This is a new drive so I doubt framentation has anything to do with this.

Mac Classic is just slow. There's really no way around it. In order to fix a huge amount of bugs that mac classics were generating, we had to turn off a feature that sped up some of processing at the cost of less accuracy -- the amount of accuracy it was dropping was just too much and led to too much instability.

That said, there is something we could do to shorten the 'Saving File' time, but the 'Verifying File' period is most likely going to remain the same (except for optimizations we can make on OSX and Windows 2000 / Windows XP).

Unfortunately, we cannot remove the verification. It is integral to know the unique ID in order to respond to other queries.

Interesting. So many people using older versions of LW on Classic have been inadvertently sharing possibly corrupt files. I'll bite the bullet and let LW hash all night then to write the correct hashes.

Better yet, can whatever file contains the hash (verification results, right?) be moved from OSX to OS 9, or does each OS have to hash its own? I use the same set of shared folders in either OS.