LimeWire OS X crashes
 

I have been trying to run LimeWire on 10.2 for a couple weeks now. (I was running c115, the last developer release) I am not using "Pro", as I wanted to get this working first.

Here are a list of problems:

Latest version doesn't connect - as noted in other discussions here, it can be made to work by pasting in new connection addresses.

Frequent crashes - OS X doesnt crash, but Limewire hangs a couple times a day. It happens most frequently after a rash of searches. I can't quite pin it down, though, but do a bunch of searches, try to download 50+ (unsuccessful) files, and it almost always hangs.

Another indicator of a hang in progress, is the GUI gets very very slow, and then after a few more minutes working, it quits.

Maybe Limewire doesnt grab enough memory?

Performance is horrible, but I don't know it is the network, or Limewire. I have spoken to people who have no problems getting consistent, reliable downloads, almost napster days like, but I can rarely find hosts wo can serve a file in one piece, or at decent consistent speeds. i have a permanent, fast connection, so the problem is unlikely on my side.
bugs:
1. When doing more than 1 row of searches, the upper row of searches cannot be deleted/canceled.
2. Force Resume does not appear to do anything unless the status is in other than "requery sent, waiting...". Would think it would force a resend, restarting the queue.
3. It looks as if when there are multiple sources for a file, that downloads are attempted from all. But it seems if one of those servers is busy, that the download doesn't proceed. Not sure about this, but sometimes multiple hosts will download more consistently, others, not at all. I cannot figure out why.
4. This will clear up when the crashes are addressed, but after about 10% of crashes, Limewire does not find the "in progress" downloads in the queue in the lower window. I imagine the list gets corrupted.
5. Queued items slow performance noticeably. For instance, if I try to download 20 items in the download list, and only 2 or 3 are actively downloading, performance still slows, and even when those initiated files complete, older queued items do not restart. their host is online, as if a download stops, sometimes you can kill download, then restart it, and it will download.
6. When running Colsole, I get the following error in the log: Sep 2 10:49:59 localhost /Applications/LimeWire/LimeWire.app/Contents/MacOS/LimeWire: kCGErrorFailure : CGTranslateCTM is obsolete; use CGContextTranslateCTM instead. (I do not know what this means, but seems like an obsolete API is being called)
7. I think this is a bug, but it may be I don't understand this well enough.. When I am able to "Browse Host", and view the files contained, I often find "multiple hosts" there. Not sure what is going on, but I expected all files to be served from the same machine/host.

GUI Issues:
Cannot do searches (as far as I can tell) using "quotes" to restrict searches to ONLY exact phrases. Such as "killer instinct" still finds instances of both words.

"Quality" is not defined well, and there seems to be no relationship between a working and non-working 4 star site. Three stars seem the same. Perhaps a note in the documentation about this?

The "connections workaround" is temporary, of course, but when I paste in a new connection, I would expect it to survie a quit. Else, hope you resolve this soon, so it is not a problem! ;-)

WishList seems to do nothing? I have to look it up and see if there is a way to use it, but at best the interface is lacking for this feature, and possibly it just doesnt work.

Feature ideas:
A "speed test" capability would be nice - have a "check connection" when a connection claims to be a t3/t1, or cable/DSL line, or even check that modems are not "underreporting". It would not be tough to have a dynamic response check before downloading a file.

"remember host" would be nice also, where I can find a connection I like, and have Limewire remember that connection for future downloads. Kind of like a friendly hosts list. Maybe there are securoty issues here.

Hope this isn't too much! ;-)

I will watch this thread for a week or so, and can supply more info if necessary.

I am also having frequent "unexpectedly quit" problems using OSX 10.2. Worked ok on 10.1.5 but now not well at all. Is there an issue with differences in 10.2?
Somebody should check this out!

I posted the first in this thread, and figured something out, which may help the developers with download complaints....

An awful lot of downloads get "stuck", where they complete a percentage of the download, then never complete. Sometimes, a download from a "4 star" host never initiates.

However, and I have replicated this a dozen times now, if you get a stubborn file, or an incomplete download, just SEARCHING for the file often activates it and begins or reactivates the download.

So there are two ways to get a file to download, kill and relaunch, or simply search again.

This has to be a bug of some sort, as this is not how LimeWire should work, it makes it very manual! ;-(

thanks again.

A couple of solutions
 

Some of your issues pertain to "features" of Limewire, can't give any advice there. But for one or two points I found solutions.

If you make a copy of your downloads.dat file from the incomplete folder (save it elsewhere obviously) and replace it after a crash or quit where you have lost your downloads queue, then you will have the downloads queue from the point at which you saved it (worked for me when I was having the same problem, anyway, but kind of a hassle).

All my Limewire crashes in OSX (several times a day, bad and restorable only with a full restart) were addressed, I'm sad to say, by limiting the # of files I shared. I know, it sort of undermines the whole gnutella idea, but Limewire was bogging and crashing to the point of unusability until I cut down my shares from 10,000 to about 1300. From then forward it has worked perfectly, not one crash.

You can also allocate more memory to the Java Virtual Machine/Runtime environment. Yes, that's right folks, it seems Apple didn't tell the "whole" truth about OS X's memory management, at least when it comes to Java apps.

First of all, make sure you've quit Limewire before you try this out. Right click(or option click on the Limewire application icon, and choose "Show package contents" from the list. Then go into the Contents/Resources folder and find the file called "MRJApp.properties" and drag a *copy* of it to your desktop for safe-keeping. Then take the "MRJApp.properties" file and drag it onto TextEdit's icon in the dock.

Find the following lines and change them to whatever you wish:

com.apple.mrj.application.gc.max=64M

com.apple.mrj.application.gc.min=2M

As you may have guessed, these represent the maximum and minimum amount of RAM that LimeWire will be able to have. As these defaults are quite low, I've changed mine to 200M and 64M. M=MB's of memory.
So, my first line looks like:
com.apple.mrj.application.gc.max=200M

and so on...

Then just save the file and Start LimeWire up.

Hope this helps....

Finder - LimeWire
 

Seems to me that when Internet file transfer occurs via the Finder it interferes with LimeWire. The best example of this is use of iDisk. Has anyone else noticed a problem here? I wonder if this might be related to the problems reported above after upgrading to 10.2. Perhaps along with 10.2 you are using your .Mac account more and that interacts with LimeWire, leading to more frequent crashes.

Another problem area I have found is an excessive number of file transfers. When I allowed up to 10 simultaneous downloads many transfers were slow, in the 1 kbps range, and there were many "Transfer interrupted" failures. After restricting to a max of 3 downloads transfers are much faster, usually 6-10 kbps, and I get a much higher frequency of successful transfer. A solution to this problem may be allocating more RAM, as suggested above, which I have not yet tried. I have about 1400 shared files, for whatever relevance that may have to memory use. I am running a 867 MHz QuickSilver. If this machine is not powerful enough to handle more than 3 downloads, people with even slower machines may want to set their max transfers even lower. Hmm... I just realized that although my cable modem can download at 4 Mbps, its upload is only 128 kbps. That may be why restricting the number of downloads from my system helps.

It would be good if someone who knows would post some advice guidelines on how to set the various parameters.

thanks Mdouma46, fantastic tip on Java. Will try it and report back.

Tom2, I have been running on a 500DP machine, not terribly slow. ;-) It only has 1GB of RAM, though. ;-)

I would love to see useful tips like the above. I will try reducing the number of transfers.

A couple things I have noticed in the past few days. I will queue up about 20 files to download, and all will "stick". If I quit and relaunch LimeWire, a couple usually start. Sometimes I have to do this a couple times.

This doesn't seem to work as well under OS 9, though. The Kill/resume works under 9, though, so this clearly seems like a bug, or setting that could be enchanced.

One other thing I notice, is that when I have LimeWire on two machines, a 9 and X, the 9 gets a lot of downloads, the X machine none. AND, many of the downloads suffer form the uincomplete probelms I suffer from, despite the fast, solid, reliable connection I have. Whatever is going on, it is a network issue, not a client issue, perhaps.