Limewire Performance: OS X v. Windows
 

First of all, I want to say that I really do appreciate what the Limewire team has done. With the demise of Napster, Limewire is by far the best file-sharing program for the Mac, particularly Mac OS X.

But . . . Limewire has always felt slow on my OS X machine. Granted, I am not running the latest and greatest hardware. My machine's a G4/400 with 448 MB RAM running OS X 10.1.2. It's not the fastest machine, but certainly shouldn't be slow. However, I don't think anybody will argue that Limewire is slow on my Mac. Certainly usable, but slow nonetheless. Switching tabs (Search, Monitor, Library, etc.) can take anywhere from 2-4 seconds and the application just overall feels very sluggish.

I've always just attributed this to the fact that Limewire is Java-based. All Java apps are inevitably slower than native code, right? I believed this until today when I decided to load Limewire on my work PC. Now my work PC is pretty fast: P4 1.7 Ghz with 2 GB of RAM. I was expecting it to be faster, but not that much faster. I was in for a rude awakening. Limewire performance on this PC compared to my home Mac was like the difference between night and day. I know that in general, my work PC is faster than my home Mac, but this was ridiculous. I almost couldn't even tell that the Windows Limewire was a Java application. It is a tad slower than native software but overall was incredibly snappy and responsive.

So why is this the case? Is it because Limewire is somehow better tuned for Windows? Is the Windows Limewire not completely Java (has Windows specific hooks)? Is it because Java support on the Mac is poor? Is it because Java runs better on X86 hardware as opposed to the PowerPC? Is it because OS X itself is slow?

Thanks for any insights on this matter.

Roger

you have put a lot of thought into this and so have others but it is my opinion that a 400mhz g4 is barely wuick enough to run osx, let alone, cpu hogging programs like limewire. try to be a freeloader and see if it helps. i have no problems on my g4 867 640mb ram that many other 400 - 600 mhz <500ram users seem to be having all over the postings. you can only adjust your prefs or tweak your computer (which is risky).

A reference to help
 

i have a quick silver G4 733. it takes the time to say "one" after cliking a tab.

I have a Quick Silver dua 800 with 1.5 GB of RAM. At times it becommes sluggish. Try "Aquisition" and see the difference . . . not quite as pretty but certainly isn't slow!

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.

Just to briefly chime in here, I very much agree that LimeWire is more sluggish on OS X. We do consistently profile LimeWire performance using standard tools, although I admit that we do our profiling on Windows (most Jave profiling tools are not available for OS X, although there are some). The primary reason for this discrepancy, however, is due to the different implementations of Java on OS X vs. Windows. The Windows JRE is from Sun, and the OS X JRE is from Apple. They are both quite strong, but the OS X JRE is significantly more sluggish (not unlike the way Quartz is generally a bit sluggish UI-wise). Sun's JRE is also better tested and has a much longer history (Java was created at Sun), whereas the current OS X JRE is strong, but has many glaring bugs that we've had to workaround, in addition to noticably sluggish performance.

That said, Jaguar (OS X 10.2) will include a really significant upgrade to Java -- from the current 1.3.1 to 1.4.0. This is a really major upgrade, especially for networking-intensive apps like LimeWire (it uses a much less-resource intensive networking model that is more ideal for p2p apps). So, we have high hopes that the upgrade will significantly improve LimeWire performance and user experience.

Thanks.

i updated to os x 10.2 and limewire works much faster than on 10.1

Just think yourselves lucky that it runs at all! LimeWire won't even launch under OS9.2.2 on my G4/400 with ONE GIGABYTE of memory, no matter how much I allocate.

I'm about to install "Panther" so we'll see how it copes with that.

Amazingly, it runs on my beige G3/233, although I use the term loosely. Like trudging through treacle.

LimeWire
 

LimeWire would probably work quick on a Intel Core 2 Duo 2.33Ghz with Mac OS X Tiger!

Probably. But then the intel core & Tiger were non existent when this thread was created or even when it was previously posted to. lol :rofl: As for a previous post about LW not running under OS 9 on a G4, I use LW on OSX & OS 9 on a G4 now & when I started with LW was running it (version 2) on a G3 under OS 8.5