OS 9 vs. OS X

Hola, I was hoping you could shed some light on the connections tab for me.
First I'm on a 0s 9's latest limewire. second i have a dsl. I don't know what messages mean, and I sure as hell don't know what messages I/O means. I'm randomly dropping hosts based on bandwith speed. If it's low I drop them. If it's high I let them stay. I have discovered the statistics window, for some reason i never goes higher than 4 connections and about 700,000 files, whether as on my Os 10 machine i can get up to 5 million files.
In summary, I can't really download anything on my os 9 machine. I can find them in searches, but then the machine resorts to:waiting in line, awaiting sources, or just downloading but the progress never goes up. What's up with that?