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Joakim Agren · #5 (**permalink**) July 18th, 2002

Hello!

The fact that LimeWire runns slow on your machine has nothing to do with the capacity of it after all,all G-4 machines are extremly capable and far out runns any pc processor of equvivalent speed.Your 400MHz machine is about as fast as a 800MHz Pentium 4 machine or 700 MHz Pentium 3.

It is not the fault of Java either.The myth that Java is slow compared to other naitive codes and programming languages is a myth.What is true is that Java execute and compiles much slower then any other kind of language so the Java apps will be slow at start up.But once they have finished loading they run much faster then any other kind of software only cocoa apps for Mac OS X can compete in speed.

I use a 400MHz G-3 iMac DV machine with a 41GB 7200RPM drive Java Runtime Environment 1.1.8(MRJ 2.2.5 30MB assigned to it) 320MB of physical memory Mac OS 9.1 and Virtual Memory Turned OFF.And the preferences inside LimeWire 2..4.4 set to ADSL/Cable speed and Ultrapeer turned off(disabled).

For me LimeWire takes a little bit longer to start up then other apps but when it has finished loading it is the fastest app I have on my computer it really is a program that reacts quickly on commands.To switch between the different tabs take me about less then a second(almost instantly).Searches takes between 60-90 secs but the initial response is almost instant and multiple searches is no problem either.The only things in LW that takes a little bit longer then in other apps is when applying changes in preferences that usually takes a couple of seconds to complete.

So from this we can conclude that it is not the capasity of your machine that is to be blaimed.I can think of a couple of things that might be causing you this slow behaviour:

Mac OS X version.The version you are using might be slow after all Mac OS X initially had some performance problems and older graphic cards where not supported but yours was but in 10.1.5 there where significant performance ehancements on older machines and the new 10.2 is supposed to be even slightly faster and even supports the ATI Rage PRO card.But even if you upgraded it might not help because Java might still be a bit slow on Mac OS X and maybe a future update of Java on Mac OS X might alleviate the problem.

Optimisation maybe the LimeWire team has not yeat successfully optimised it completely with Mac OS X and a future update might solve this.I think that the fact that Mac OS X automatically uses Virtual Memory and cannot be turned off like in classical Mac OS might be the cause of this.My experience with running LimeWire on my machine with Virtual Memory is that it becomes very sluggish and causes wear and tear on my HD and crashes alot but ever since I upgraded my RAM to 320MB and turned OFF Virtual Memory LimeWire has only crashed on me like twice in the past 7 months but never seriusly I just had to re launch it.Conclusion LimeWire seems to hate the Macintosh kind of VM but for Windows which like Mac OS X also have automatic VM have not given Windows users any problem.But my experience is that LW for classical Mac OS runns even faster then LW for Windows.

But before going into any conclusions you must check this in LimeWire first:

In LimeWire Go to:

Tools>Options>Speed

Here make sure that your correct connection speed is choosen and that you have disabled Ultrapeer capabilitys(If you are not using a T-1-T-3 line then ofcourse you should have this option turned on).It should have a check mark in the box if not then just click in the box and then click apply then Ok and you are done.

Now close LW and re launch it and see if it will run faster for you.

If not then I would recommend that you purchased a new 7200 RPM HD that and a fresh install of your entire system on that HD will for sure speed things up for you.Maybe your HD is severly fragmented and you can also try to use a disk utility like DiskWarrior to optimize your HD and defrag it.