Greetings britboi

Hmmm that is strange I can dual boot on this comp. WinXP pro sp2 or WinXP MCE sp2. I've never had a problem uninstalling and reinstalling java from versions 1.3.x to my present 1.5.0_01. That includes the Japanese version.

Sounds like something is not right with your registry. Try cleaning the registry. You can search the forums here. You will find links to several if you don't have one.

If that doesn't work try booting your comp. from your WinXP cd and do a repair.

Best of luck

Sorry I wasn't clear. I meant forum search. Enter peacec under user name.

Here is the link. http://www.gnutellaforums.com/showth...threadid=34408

I've discovered something significant about this problem, using Sun's 1.5 JRE on a WinXP SP2 b0x.

Even if Limewire is set via Task Manager to BelowNormal or even Low priority, it will sometimes preempt other tasks -- ones at Normal and even AboveNormal priority, and sometimes even the Task Manager itself at High priority!

For example, I can run a certain game application in a window and see it using about 40% CPU in Task Manager and getting roughly 60FPS. If I run Limewire and set it to BelowNormal priority, with the game at the default (Normal) priority, it drops to around 50FPS and sometimes spikes down to 20 or occasionally locks up completely for a while. Task Manager shows the following damning statistics:

95% CPU use by Limewire
5% CPU use by the game, which normally uses more and has the higher priority
Memory usage (commit charge) well below physical RAM in b0x
Steady pf usage and similar statistics

And the drive activity light shows no significant amount of drive activity.

So, what exactly is Limewire grabbing from the game? Both are running in windows so it isn't video contention. I'm not using Limewire's media player, so only the game is using the soundcard. The low mem use and lack of HDD activity seem to indicate no swapping/thrashing and no contention for explicitly accessing disk files either. Limewire is a user input, network, and event driven app that presents a GUI which is idle at the time; the game presents a window with DirectX graphics and uses DirectInput. They can't be clashing over input then. The game is local, single player; so they are not clashing over network access (Limewire has it exclusively).

That seems to mean that the game isn't blocking on something that's busy (hdd, network, whatever) and yielding CPU to Limewire. And yet Limewire is hogging the CPU. The only explanation I can think of is that Limewire is preempting the game -- even though it has the lower priority.

Fix Limewire to respect its priority setting and let higher priority apps preempt it.

Also, fix Limewire not to frequently saturate a 1.5GHz Athlon XP. What the hell is an event-driven app doing using that much CPU anyway?!

This might be related to Limewire -- I don't know. Usual setup: 4.something Limewire on XP SP2, using Sun's JRE 1.5.something.

Every so often the entire machine spazzes out: everything becomes slow, and network-using apps become unusable (take forever to make a connection, fetch a Web page, whatever).

Task Manager shows one of the svchost.exes using 95%+ CPU. This is with a fairly beefy Athlon -- and it stays that way for several WHOLE MINUTES, on a 2GHz CPU. That's around a trillion clock cycles being used by, apparently, NETWORK SERVICES. The only NETWORK SERVICES I can think of that need a trillion clock cycles are really heavy crypto or hundred-K-connection Web servers, which I'm not running. (Limewire is limited to 30 simultaneous downloads and 5 uploads -- yup, broadband.)

A Google for svchost CPU usage problems found numerous complaints where the problem was some service getting stuck starting up; the services control panel in XP showed nothing of the sort during several of these incidents. There were only two network services started, and these were "started", not "starting", and several that were stopped. The running ones were DNS and some RPC thing.

Event viewer does show a bunch of application events generated whenever the seizeup starts, and a bunch more when it ends, but they aren't listed as coming from Limewire. They are "Database stopped" or "Database stopped the instance" after the seizeup, and "started" or "started the instance" before. They come from various alphanumerically named executables like "wuclault" and such, whose names are unpronounceable. Googling them shows them to be Windows Update related. Turning off automatic updates hasn't stopped the seizeups, however, and they started when I got Limewire 4 and started using it regularly. Plus, as others in this thread have noted, Limewire is quite the resource hog.

The system is clean of viruses and spyware. The seizeups don't have any particularly regular timing, but have an elevated probability of occurring if I'm actively doing stuff in limewire, particularly just after a "find more sources" button click. Naturally, this results in it finding no sources, since clicky->seizeup->Limewire starved for CPU and all network stuff getting painfully slow during seizeups->Limewire hangs with a nonresponsive UI and drops all its connections and can't make new ones, so no sources are found.

(And I can't even go and do something else while I wait for Limewire to recover. Web browsers will spin for 30 or more seconds before even beginning to render a page, news can't be fetched, mail can't be fetched, and so forth, while the seizeup is in progress. Everything just tends to spin or timeout, and games and such won't run acceptably with svchost hogging the CPU either! So much for "multitasking" -- another great idea that falls flat when anyone actually tries to implement it. :P)

That other guy is right -- it does preempt stuff that has a higher priority than it, on Windows XP. Funny thing is, it doesn't always. Winamp's visualizer will stutter whenever Limewire preempts Winamp; if I play a long song and give Limewire low priority, it will still stutter every so often. And strangely enough the pauses seem to come in groups of four. It will run for a bit, then will come four one-second pauses with three one-second gaps between them. After a while, this will happen again. And again. Every once in a while, it will even make the music stutter and pop -- even though the music runs at high priority!

This should not be happening. What is wrong with Limewire? Or is the VM itself the problem? This seems doubtful though, since I see these problems and use Sun's VM rather than some third-party VM of dubious trustworthiness.

Java is not especially efficient to say the least. LW is built on & utilises Java to operate. So if there's a problem with Java then it'll affect LW. Apparently further down the track, hopefully with version 5, LW will be making better use of Java & not be so at its mercy due to Java's shortcomings. See THIS post (click on link) by et voilà.

There's a huge gap between "not especially efficient" and "violates all kinds of standards" -- and I have verified that Java (or Limewire, at least) does indeed violate standards, namely that a lower priority task is not supposed to preempt a higher priority task under a true multitasking kernel (such as the NT kerel in XP, and any unix whatsoever -- in other words, nearly every modern computer, including home computers).

Yep -- a Limewire "niced" to BelowNormal priority makes tasks with AboveNormal priority stutter on my own XP rig, despite there being enough RAM for both tasks and the tasks not having to time share any other device (e.g. network, hdd). No swapping, no significant drive activity, but task manager shows the CPU usage swing massively in favor of Limewire every so often, and I guarantee the other task is not yielding the CPU voluntarily or blocking on anything!

Why does it do this? This is like the bad old days of 16-bit Windows 3.1 crap!

What version of LimeWire and Java are you using?

The most recent, in both cases: 4.8.1 on Sun JRE 1.5.

What tha heck happened to this thread? It used to have four pages, and some more stuff by "unregblah" after the windows 3.1 crack...