LW slows down whole computer
 

This has only gotten worse and worse with every new version! When will you fix it?

Limewre when running slows the whole computer to a crawl. Even when it's a machine with a decent CPU and lots of memory, everything becomes slow. It's worse some times than others -- sometimes the mouse won't move smoothly and jumps about, even. This happens even if limewire is set to "low priority" from the task mnager.

Help!

Why does it slow things down even when it's got low prioruity? Why does it use 100 of the cpu?! What kind of machine are we supposed to be using here, quad zeons with 4 gigabyts ram? Arrrgh!

Just be sure that you have the latest java. LW doesn't use 30% of CPU even on my 450mhz machine... I wonder what you have got... The problem is probably on your hand, how many simultaneous downloads do you have in the download window?

Ciao

I have broadband so I let it have 30 simulraneous downloadz.

System is winxp sp2, latest java, latest limewire, latest veeyrthing basicly.

Anybody? help?

Some tips:

* Tip: Purge the Downloads Queue!
* After opening LW wait 10 to 20 mins before using. Let it settle down 1st.
* Go to Tools>Options>Speed & tick disable Ultrapeer Cap. & press apply button.
* Set both uplds & downlds to autoclear.
* Close all LW windows you don't need open at that time.
* You might also consider reducing shared files if you have multiple thousands of them.
* Also don't use the Resume/Find Sources button on all incomplete files. This can have side-fx such as affect LW's connection quality. This will also stress LW & your comp. If you use Resume/Find sources then just apply it to a couple or so at one time.
* Reduce uplds to about 70-80% or more. Reduce downlds to 80 or 90%.
* Disable LW's media player so your default player opens instead (Tools>Options>Player & untick option & press Apply.)
* If you're not actually actively using LW then hide it in the background or in the program tray (minimized.)

Why? I don't want to give up on those files. Besides, only a handful are active at a time.

Already did those things.

Why? I only have around 500, but ... why? I have only five upload slots and ten queue slots, which limits how many active things might demand cpu power.

I've noticed that -- I never send more than a screenful at once, and wait several mnutes before sending more.

What, bandwidth? Why reduce download bandwidth? Even upload bandwidth -- I think my connection has seprate caps on each...

I never use the limewire media player.

That seems to help a little...sometimes...

OK, I've got this too. I want to know why limewire seems to do cpu-intensive calculations sometimes, given that it's a network oriented app and event driven. And why does it do them at a fairly high priority? Sometimes making the user interface unusable for an extended period of time.

anyone???

Upgrade Java, it worked for me. Limewire no longer slows down my computer.

get it here:

http://java.sun.com

I have the most recent one. 1.5.

I have been reading all of these posts about Limewire slowing down people's computers, to the point where it consumes 100% of their CPU resources. For a lot of you, I suspect that it may not be Limewire at all that is doing it. You may be infected with a virus, as I was. One quick way to tell if you are infected with this virus, is to try hitting CTRL-ALT-DEL once. If the Task Manager DOES NOT appear, then you are infected, and it's a virus that is slowing your computer down. I have posted these steps elsewhere in the forum, and I am going to repost them here. They take less than 20 minutes to complete, and once you're done them, you will be SOOOOO happy!

My problem originally was that Limewire was not only appearing to slow down my computer excessively, but I also had Limewire opening on Startup without me having specified that as an action in the Preferences. It took me literally 24 hours to run through the files and registry on my computer before I figured out this solution. Every single antivirus program I tried failed to detect this virus. What a great $80 spent! Useless!

Anyways, here are the steps:

1) Uninstall Limewire. You can reinstall it at the end of these steps.

2) Disable System Restore in Windows. This can be done by right
clicking on My Computer, selecting Properties, and then clicking on the System Restore tab. Then check the box Turn Off System Restore. Hit

Apply, and then OK. If you are prompted to restart Windows, do so.

3) Now we need to fool the virus into allowing us to open the Task Manager. This can be done by copying the Task Manager executable file from the Windows directory. To do this, go to c:\windows\system32, select the file taskmgr.exe, right click on it, and select Copy. Go to the desktop, and click on an empty part of the desktop. Then right click on the desktop, and select Paste.

4) Double click on the taskmgr.exe file on your desktop. This should open the Task Manager. Click on the Performance tab. If you are in fact infected with a virus, you will likely (although not necessarily) see close to 100% CPU usage!! Now click on the Processes tab, followed by clicking twice on the CPU column header. What this does is order the files running on your computer based on the amount of CPU resources they are consuming in real time. If there is a process, other than System Idle Process, that is consuming close to 100% of the CPU, then
it is this process (or file) that is infecting your computer. For me,
and likely for a lot of you, that file will be winupdates.exe. Don't
be tricked. This is not a Microsoft program. It's a virus masking
itself as a legitimate file. Please remember the exact name of this
process, because you will need it in a later step.

5) Click on this process to highlight it, then click the button End
Process. A warning prompt should pop up. Click on Yes.

6) Now that this process is killed, we need to remove any references to it from the Registry. Once again, because this virus is blocking us from opening the Registry Editor, we need to trick the virus by copying the file to the desktop. Follow the same steps as in number 3, except this time, copy the following two files from their respective directories, and paste them on the desktop.

c:\windows\regedit.exe
c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe

7) Open regedit from the desktop. In the left window, click on My
Computer so that it is highlighted. Now select Edit from the menu, followed by Find. In the Find box, type the name of the process that you ended from the Task Manager. If you recall, mine was winupdates. Do not include the .exe, just winupdates. Then click Find.

8) For the item that it found in the right window, click it to highlight it if it isn't highlighted already, and then right click on
it, and select Delete. If a prompt pops up, select Yes or OK to
confirm the delete.

9) Now, hit the F3 button once. This will find the next reference to
that bad file. Follow step 8 again to delete the reference. Repeat steps 9 and 8 until the editor indicates that there are no more references to this file. Then exit the editor.

10) Finally, click on cmd.exe which you copied to the desktop. It will open the Command Prompt (which looks like DOS). Type the following commands in order, and hit Enter after each line:

cd c:\
cd program files
rd /s /q winupdates

11) 1) Go to the following directory and delete any file with winupdates in the name.

c:\windows\prefetch

12) Now restart your computer. Reinstall Limewire.

13) Please make sure to go back into the System Properties by right clicking on My Computer, and unchecking the Turn Off System Restore box under the System Restore tab.


This should hopefully fix your problem.

For those of you who can't seem to find taskmgr.exe, cmd.exe, or
regedit.exe, I would suggest you do the following if you have not
already done so:

Open My Computer. Select Tools from the menu, followed by Folder Options. Click on the View tab. Make sure that there is a check mark next to the following items:

Display the Contents of System Folders
Show Hidden Files and Folder

Now, make sure there are no checkmarks beside the following:
Hide protected Operating System Files.

Also, if you are using the Search function in Windows to locate these files, make sure that you do it in the following way:

1) Click on the Start button in Windows, and then select Search.

2) Select All Files and Folder

3) Enter the file name in the first box.

4) Click on More Advanced Options.

5) Make sure that the following all have checkmarks next to them:
Search System Folders
Search Hidden Files and Folders
Search Subfolders

Then once these are checked, click on Search.

I hope this helps! :-)

Bobby Naini

This is different from the usual case, where task manager works fine and shows Limewire to be the process hogging the CPU, rather than winupdates or some such thing.

Also, don't use symantec for antivirus. Norton anything is a piece of **** -- Norton used to be synonymous with quality, around the same time "this year" was synonymous with a number starting with the digits 198. :P

F-prot and AVG are frequently recommended and both have free-for-personal-use editions. Ad-aware and Spybot S&D also do, and should both be used to sweep one's system for additional categories of malware.

As for the Limewire bugginess, AFAICT it's just that Java scales extraordinarily poorly. All large Java apps seem to bring my Athlon 1800+ 1.53GHz with 1GB RAM to its knees from time to time. It seems there's two aspects to this. One is inefficient memory usage (what kind of object structure does sun's java use, anyway?) -- Java apps seem to slow down and get cranky way before an equivalent-functionality application written in C does on my machine, as if the machine has a fraction the memory it does, suggesting Java takes several times as much memory to do a given job as C or even C++. Possibly as much as 10 times(!). Even so, I rarely see Limewire's process size bloat up much above a measly 100 meg or so, and with lots of physical ram free Java apps seem to be quite capable of slowing down and flaking out as if they were running low on mem and having to swap. And this with no visible disk activity to indicate pagefile usage. I don't know what Sun's engineers were thinking, but they seem to have made Java emulate a late-90s computer's speed, capacity, and swapfile (to a ram disk?!) in their VM for some reason... The other aspect is CPU use. I don't know if it's Java itself, or poorly-designed Java apps, but big Java apps seem to have CPU usage when idle, and increasing in proportion to the amount of "stuff" open in the app, as though just about every live object is associated with its own thread and those threads do a lot of polling or busy-waiting. My personal prime suspect in this case is Swing, which is event-driven and involves threading heavily...in any case, the observed behavior seems to mean that more objects translates into not merely mem use, but also CPU use. Which is odd -- I've dabbled in Java a bit myself and made small apps, and other than Runnable objects passed to thread creation methods it didn't seem to me from the API docs or from experience that objects automatically translate into CPU activity even when they are just sitting somewhere and not being acted on at the time. Maybe LW does a lot of stuff with runnables and creating lots of runnable objects scales poorly?

Hey guys,

I'm a computer programmer at the Uni. We're running a pretty top-shape comp here, with an Athlon 3600 and 1 gig of RAM. Everyone in my lab could write their own virus if they chose, so I'm definitely not infected. We're firewalled, but the firewall isn't the issue. Also, we're using the absolute latest builds of Java because some of us develop in Java. And yet, Limewire slows down the computer to the point where the whole thing is unusable if it isn't hidden in the tray.

I can run a Java app like Eclipse that takes twice as much memory as Limewire, and that runs at decent speed.

The weird thing is that I've had limewire working at normal speed, a week ago.

Any clues?

-Thomas

One of the things about Java is that the older APIs encouraged/forced the use of many threads. MS Windows, in particular, bogs down when there are tons of threads.

Java didn't even have non-blocking TCP sockets until Java 1.4. Now that most Macintosh users have a Java 1.4 JVM, LimeWire can start using the more efficient 1.4 APIs without leaving anyone stranded.

The new LimeWire beta version uses one thread to handle all of the TCP connections, rather than needing two threads for each and every TCP connection.

You might want to try the new LimeWire beta version. It's much more efficient with large numbers of connections.

There is no beta link on the main Limewire page, which says the current version is still 4.8.1. Where is the beta available?

Hrm, the link just appeared today on the main limewire page. :P

This thing is supposed to be LESS resource intensive and perform BETTER?

With unchanged options and the same download list:

4.8.1 4.9.0
170meg 225meg!
High cpu use High cpu use
70-odd threads 40-odd threads

Fewer threads, at the expense of needing more RAM and no less CPU than earlier versions.

Also, 4.9.0 has a nasty habit of hanging for several seconds (sometimes a couple DOZEN seconds) after completing any download. It simply stops responding completely for this time -- whatever it is doing consumes 100% of a 1.5GHz CPU during this time and takes priority over UI event handling(!) -- if it's like that for 10 seconds that means it performed around 15 billion calculations to do whatever the heck it's doing. What the devil is an event-driven app doing performing 15 billion calculations in response to a network event? The previous version (same size library, same size downloads list, and only the search/download tab visible) didn't exhibit this behavior -- though it did if the library tab was visible, queerly enough.

It also seems to be quicker to give up on a file and say "Awaiting sources", although it seems to be quicker (when it isn't hung, that is) to do some other things also...

Beta bugs
 

Just checked out the beta myself -- I notice the same performance problems, including the lengthy pause after each download completes, but turning off the new "automatically share downloaded files" and always manually deciding what to share seems to fix that one. There's a couple weird/funky bugs though.

1. The green check symbol most definitely doesn't work as intended. I saw one I was sure I didn't have and went to download it -- nothing. No file overwrite prompt, nor the new "the file matches content in your library" one. There's maybe one file like this per search, given a bogus green check. So grabbing everything in some group of files still means selecting them all, regardless of green check, hitting "download", and wading through the resulting overwrite prompts. Otherwise you risk missing something. Sigh.

2. Downloads sometimes get stuck at 100%. Once in a while a download finishes but doesn't go to "Complete" status (and then, if auto-clear is on, disappear) -- instead it stays saying "downloading", 100% progress, 0kb/s throughput. Hitting "pause" and then "resume" results in the file being stuck "queued" with 100% progress, rather than it doing whatever it's supposed to do and granting it "complete" status.

3. It seems to be much harder to get files from a "reluctant" host. You know the type -- you find some interesting files in a group that prove to be co-hosted; select them all; and three of them download and the rest say "Need more sources". Hit "find sources" on these, and three more download and the rest say "Awaiting sources". Previously (4.8.1 and earlier) you could select these and hit resume, and you'd get another three files, and so forth, eventually getting them all. In the 4.9.0 beta, this doesn't work -- the files will go to "queued" very briefly, and then back to "awaiting sources", or even fail to change status at all. Apparently if a host does the wrong thing and pretends to have gone offline in lieu of sending a civilised busy signal, 4.9.0 will forget it ever existed. Repeating the search that found the files will usually (but by no means always) cause the next three to download. It should be noted that some of the 4.x Limewires are among the hosts with the bad busy-signal behavior described above, where they act like they've gone offline rather than are merely busy when the max concurrent downloads per downloader is reached.

What about 2 or 300, or even 2 or 3000? With the default max of 5 active at a time?

In theory, it shouldn't matter how many are pending if the machine has plenty of RAM; CPU use should depend solely on the number active at a time. In practise...

Yes. Smegma is right -- the problem is that Limewire scales very poorly, not that it doesn't perform well with a small load. Increase the hardware from your AMD 500MHz and 128 ram to something modern, and increase the demands you put on Limewire in proportion, and Limewire chokes. Somehow, either it doesn't utilize all the resources available, or it scales worse than linearly with the amount of files shared, amount of pending downloads, and such. Neither should be the case.

Actually, sorting would be a mild exception to that. Sort the download list by e.g. name and you should see n log n (at worst) scaling behavior, which is worse than linear but not, admittedly, by much. But the behavior Limewire exhibits here looks like it must be quadratic, or worse, or it wouldn't be notices. There's no excuse for quadratic scaling in this sort of application, and there's also no excuse for the user interface freezing or for it to hog the CPU even to the point of pre-empting higher priority tasks. I've seen it lock up a Windows machine myself -- even Task Manager wouldn't respond, and it had High priority and Limewire had Below Normal due to its having kept things like web surfing from being painless at Normal. When the system recovered, the Task Manager popped up and showed Limewire coming down from 100% cpu use, so there's little doubt as to who the culprit was.

The user interface event handling thread should not block waiting for anything, period. A task should never pre-empt anything with a higher priority, period. Quadratic or worse scaling behavior in this type of app is unacceptable, period. Something is very wrong here.

LW slows down whole computer
 

Dear Bucketofbolts:

LimeWire slows down my computer, too.

It is a heavy program that requires lots of resources. I am running Windows XP, and by using Ctrl-Alt-Del to open the Task Manager, I can see that LW places a heavy burden on my "commit cache."

I get the feeling that what you want to do is run LW in the background and still be able to do something else with your computer. The short answer is, you have to have a lot of computer in order to run LimeWire and still do other things.

My Dell computer came with lots of software loaded that I didn't need, and didn't want, and I have freed lots of memory by disabling or totally removing useless software. hkcmd.exe, for example, is an Intel program that is totally unnecessary, but to make it go away and release the memory that it occupied, I first had to discover what it was, and then disable it.

Most computer owners have software running that they neither need nor want, and this is especially true of us who bought a computer already preloaded with software. Off-the-shelf computers that seem like a bargain always have lots of preloaded software that place a burden on system resources, and what you have to do is decide which programs you want to keep and which you want to uninstall.

Get rid of the crap you don't want, and you'll find that your computer will stand up and do tricks that you didn't expect it could do.

So without even knowing what your particular situation is, Bucketofbolts, I suspect you have lots of programs running in the background, many of which you neither need nor want, that are slowing your computer down even before you try to load and run LimeWire.

My computer is a low-end, rather crappy thing, but I can run LimeWire, listen to music from ShoutCast, play a modest video game, explore my hard drive, and do all this without overheating my processor. I accomplished this by getting rid of the programs I didn't need and didn't want.

I hope this helps you somehow. I can't offer you specific help; it's more a general idea.

Donkeyboy

Yes. Smegma is right -- the problem is that Limewire scales very poorly, not that it doesn't perform well with a small load. Increase the hardware from your AMD 500MHz and 128 ram to something modern, and increase the demands you put on Limewire in proportion, and Limewire chokes.

Well I guess mabey you should read some of the forum post on setting up L/W. I once had the same problem and followed Lord Of The Rings Sugestions and cleared the problem up. And as far as modernizing you mabey you should learn how to configure L/W before you speak. I have used all the P2P software out there and L/W is the best of all. On my machine I have been downloading up to 7 files at one time at speeds of up to 300KB/s and up loading 2 files at 35KB/s in ultraper mode. As I am wrighting this I am DL 2 files at 150KB/s and UL 2 at 35KB/s and I leave L/W running for days at a time surf the web and play games like Half Life 2 at the same time. Not bad for a modern machine that chokes on L/W. My current ues is cpu 3% Mem 52440

AMD 64 3200+ overclocked 3.2 GHZ
1 GIG 3200 corsair ram
ASUS A8V Deluxe
EVGA e-GeForce 6200 NVIDIA
Adaptec 29320 SCSI U320 Adapter card
2-Fujitsu 15,000 RPM SCSI ULTRA 320 74 GB hard drives 0-Raid
1 WesternDigatal 120 GB
I would say I have a fairly modern machine and have no problem at all with L/W. So mabey you should try fixing your settings before you make coments like you made then mabey the rest of us wont know how much you really dont know.

Try listining to others and good luck

My setup is fine thank you very much. Ultrapeer disabled, no unnecessary tabs open, etc. -- the scaling behavior remains poor. There's no reason it should work fine with a few files pending, but bog down with a few hundred or more, on modern hardware. If a few pending files works on decade-old hardware a few hundred should work fine on modern hardware.

Well OK so you think it is a problem with L/W I do not think this is the case. I run L/W on 3 diffrent computers and it works fine on all 3 it uses between 3% & 5% of my cpu and 40,000k & 60,000k mem depending on how much UL & DL are going on weather I am in ultrapper moed etc, all are running L/W 4.9 and the latest java In the previous post I made a mistake on Ghz cpu is running
#1
AMD 64 3200+ overclocked 2.3 GHZ
1 GIG 3200 corsair ram
ASUS A8V Deluxe
EVGA e-GeForce 6200 NVIDIA
Adaptec 29320 SCSI U320 Adapter card
2-Fujitsu 15,000 RPM SCSI ULTRA 320 74 GB hard drives 0-Raid
1 WesternDigatal 120 GB
#2
AMD 2600+ overclocked 2 Ghz
1.5 Ghz kingston PC 2700
MSI K7N2 Delta
MSI GeForce 5200
1 WesternDigatal 120 GB
#3
Toshiba Laptop
Intel Celleron M 1.5 Ghz
768 MB Kingston Sodium
Intel extreme graphics

As you can se there is quite a bit of diffrence in these 3 machines but they all preforme fine with L/W running I am able to play games cruse the net or do whatever. I do notice a slight decline in the laptop but not much. So you can blamb L/W if you wish butt I think you are wrong. All the above machines are running XP Pro

Latter Grandpa

I've found the problem. Previous versions of Limewire didn't give a crap how many files were in your download directory, so long as you weren't sharing it.

4.9 does. And there were over 40,000 files in it (though only 499 shared).

Moving some of them and cutting it down to 20,000 produced a performance improvement. Moving more of them produced a bigger improvement.

Limewire's memory use shouldn't even be scaling with the size of a disk directory IMO -- that's the whole point of something being a disk directory, so that only some of it needs be referenced in memory at a time.

Limewire's CPU use certainly shouldn't be scaling with the size of a disk directory. It should only scale with actual activity -- user input, active uploads, active downloads, and active peer connections should contribute to CPU use, and nothing but these. Yet downloads "awaiting sources" still seem to contribute, and in 4.9 even unshared files sitting in the download destination folder seem to contribute.

LimeWire calculates cryptographic hashes for all of those files and stores them in RAM, which speeds up the process of sharing those files if you so choose. This is quite CPU intensive until all of the files in your download directory have been hashed.

Ideally, all filesystems would support rich metadata that would allow LimeWire to store the SHA-1 and Tiger tree as an attribute of each file. However, this is not the case, and storing this information in RAM is a nearly ideal solution for nearly all users.

For most users, this increases the speed with which they can share files and doesn't waste much RAM or CPU time on files that will never be shared. Your situation happens to be an extreme case, and your work-around is easy and effective.

Actually, the workaround doesn't work, unless I want to keep getting duplicate files. I have to leave a file there as long as I'm doing searches that might turn it up, or it won't show as something I already have.

I saw someone mention in a thread somewhere using zero length files of the same name. Would that avoid the problem? Hashing a zero length file shouldn't exactly take long. In fact Limewire ought sensibly to ignore such files except for the purposes of generating "file already exists, overwrite?" prompts.

That's the only way to keep track of a lot of files you already have without doing it in ram I think -- that or keeping the actual files themselves in the download directory indefinitely. Without either a duplicate hash or a duplicate file name Limewire will have no way of flagging duplicates in search results, and it seems keeping all the hashes of every file ever downloaded is prohibitively slow and expensive...

New User - Slow Performance too
 

I have read this whole thread on system slowdown. I have a similiar problem but do not have high CPU utilization.
I have a 1.8 ghz p4 500 ram running xp pro and LW 4.8.1 pro, java 1.5.4 and cable connection.

I have have max uploads and downloads set to 4 and have followed the previous suggestions for LW setup.

LW runs about 4 to 15% cpu and 40,000 - 60,000 memory.

It seems to run fine when first started and then as the day goes on it progressively slows my machine down. Switching between active windows takes forever as the graphics slowly are displayed. The disk drive goes crazy like a lot a swapping is going on. Stuff is downloading great, but I sacriface using my machine for anything else because of the horrible performance.

It seems that one I switch to and active appplication, say Lotus notes, and it gets caught up, that app is runs better until you switch to another app.

It is really bad if you let it lock out from inactivity. It takes for ever for it to wake up and log back in.

The machine runs fine once I shut LW down. Azureus had the same problem but worse, that is why I tried LW.

There must be something we are missing here. Any suggestions?

Update on previous post
 

An update on my previous post. I have since followed the few tips that suggested that you close any LW windows you don't need open (all in my case, search windows and such) and CLOSE (not minimize) the application window so that it minimizes to the systray. Since doing this, my system does perform much better. I still have some delay, but not as bad as before. Seems funny that such minor changes can have such an impact, but they did for me.

This is strange but ... if you open and then close the library tab, LW performs better than if you have it closed from the start of a session. The hanging-for-a-bit-after-every-download problem goes away.

If you exit LW with the library tab hidden, and then restart, and have tens of thousands of files in the download directory, it will freeze for a while after every completed download. If you then show the library tab and hide it again, this freezing behavior stops occurring for the remainder of the session.

Strange.

Not that it's relevant, but nVidia.

It's strange, here on my comp Limewire is VERY slugish I can't search or download because it goes to 100% CPU Usage, and I have a old laptop Celeron and I have installed there and it works out of the box

BTW I have too a Nvidia card...

Shouldn't matter. I know enough about Java to know that there's an abstraction layer between Limewire and any dependency on what the graphics card manufacturer is, and enough about Windows to know that on NT/2K/XP, there are two abstraction layers between Limewire and the gfx card.

Anyway, I'd expect the gfx card to possibly be a problem for 3d games and not much else. Certainly not a traditional gui app whose only graphics are command buttons and text labels, one that doesn't do anything at all fancy with graphics. And even if the card gave a game problems, I'd expect having up to date drivers to fix them. And I do have up to date drivers, the better to play Quake 3 with. :)

Actually there have been issues with graphics cards. eg: The way to fix the Blank screen on startup There's also been laptop issues which involved needing to upgrade their intel drivers, etc. And also these probs

Also for some people, they've found the beta version to be a little more system friendly. But how it performs on particular systems, as with the 4.8.1 will of course vary. Pro users can downld the pro beta from their personal downld page. For everyone else from here http://www.limewire.com/english/content/beta.shtml

More Toshiba Laptop dancer problems (lol :D) http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,3...9172275,00.htm

http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=e...G=Search&meta=

http://www.forwardingsite.com/comput...-notebook.html

http://www.techsupportforum.com/comp...c/58066-1.html

http://forums.computingreview.com/showthread.php?t=319

Doesn't make sense. A 3d game being wonky with a problem video card or old/buggy drivers I can see, but a normal gui app? If there was a problem with my card or drivers that serious, wouldn't the web browser and every other gui app be affected as well? And there are no graphics problems -- this is generic slow down, excessive RAM and CPU use, sluggish UI etc., not visual glitches or out-and-out crashes which is what video card problems normally produce.

And besides, it can't be my video card because if it were there'd be nothing I could do about it. Everything is fully up to date, drivers-wise, and I certainly aren't about to spend ~$200 replacing the actual card, given that it works perfectly with everything else on my system -- and I do mean everything. Including actual graphics-intensive games and the like, as well as normal gui apps.

If it is the graphics card, it isn't the card's fault -- it's Limewire having a spurious dependency on it, and not merely demanding that it work properly but even being gratuitously incompatible with certain brands, manufacturers, and chipsets. Which would mean you're using JNI to do low-level graphics calls and even trying to bypass the NT kernel HAL, which is a big no-no. Just use swing and forget about anything fancy!

Agreed. This is a Limewire bug, even if it only gets provoked when a certain video card type is in use. Nothing should fail to work properly due to choice of a video card, so long as the video card is good enough for the demand placed on it (i.e., you're not trying to play Doom 3 on a GeForce 1) and the card is physically working and the drivers are reasonably up to date (at least as recent as the application).

You know, in all this discussion about whether video cards can make Limewire slow, I haven't seen anyone suggest a workaround for people with nvidia cards? A setting they can change or something. The closest thing was one of those links led to someone who had limewire not work at all until they set their ATI (not nvidia!) to let applications decide whether to antialias, rather than force antialiasing on all apps.

I'm curious because I also experience Limewire being slow, using lots of CPU, preempting other tasks, and have an nvidia card. It's already set to per-application antialiasing etc., however.

Certainly, nobody's about to throw out their video card and buy an expensive replacement just because of one app, so there had better be a saner alternative...

From what I see here: http://www.gnutellaforums.com/showth...threadid=39600 it seems to be to downgrade Java to 1.4.2 if those symptoms described happen. AFAIK the video card issues are not affecting the LW beta. Not the ati ones anyway. The beta also starts up faster, & closes faster.

What about people who had just as much slowdown/etc. with Java 1.4.2, before Java 1.5 came out? Unreg-whatever has been posting here for donkey's years complaining intermittently of slowdowns and the like. Since version 3 something!
Is that the nvidia thing? If it is, going back to 1.4.2 won't do any good if it was just as bad before 1.5 ever came out...

try upgrading to LW version 4.9.3 Beta and see if that helps

Ok I've downgraded to JRE 1.4.2 and now LimeWire works as it should without slowdowns!! thanks!!

yeah i have the same problem with the beta as well, and it is NOT the video card, i have an nvidia geforce 6600gt, and trust me its WELL overclocked, almost all the way both core and mem, so there would be no problems with GUI, everything else works beautifully yet when i open limewire and ONLY limewire, lag galore, this has to be a LW problem.

system:

AMD64 3700 @ 2.5ghz
1gb mushkin
dfi lan party nf4 ultra-D motherboard
6600gt

there is absolutely NO reason that LW should be this CPU/mem intensive, that is just beyond me, perhaps there is an error in the coding, but i havent had this problem until recently, to tell you the truth, this is a new system, and when i installed limewire i even let it install the java for me, so that just shows its a programming problem, so if you have any suggestions, tell me.

also, would there be a chance of a 64bit version of LW?

I do not understand why you say it has to be a LW problem I run LW all of the time can play Half Life2 while LW is running I have no problem surfing the net running Office aplications, or running Adobe CS2 & Adobe photoshop3 editing photos while LW is running when I am surfing the net or playing Half Life on stream I set LW to UL 30Kb/s I really do not know what I am downloading at when gaming but I usually DL at 50 to 300Kb/s I have no trouble on my machines whitch are not that much diffrent from yours. There are times I leave LW running for days I do occasionly notice that LW is using allot of MEM 65,000K+ when running in Ultrapper Leaf usually 40,000K or less CPU usage 2% with spikes at 17% I have never seen it go above that my current machine is set up as follows

AMD 64 3200+ set at 240X10 = 2.4GHz
1 GB Corsair 3200 Value Ram 1.7v
EVGA e-GeForce 6200 core Clock 400MHz Mem Clock 635MHz
2-Fujitsu 74GB 15K Ultra 320 SCSI 0-Raid
Adaptec 29320 Ultra 320 SCSI card
120 GB WD Hard Drive
ASUS A8V Ultra Motherboard

As you can see your machine should be out preforming mine and I am having no problem with LW causing any type of lag. I did have a problem before on my other machine wit a blank screen when LW opened it has a MSI FX 5200 nvidia if I changed from 32bit to 16bit the problem would go away and and I havent seen that problem since version 4.2 I believe that LW is a mem intsive program but it is not a cripleing program in any way. There may be a problem in the way LW is set up or a driver or any number of things allot of people tend to blame LW for problems but believe me if LW is propperley set up there is no better P2P software out there go back and read some of the tips in the forum and try them it took me a while to get LW to run the way it does now and it sems that diffrent things work for diffrent people but it will be worth it if you get it set up propperley for your machine.

Latter Grandpa

http://img302.imageshack.us/img302/1868/lw15cr.png
http://img302.imageshack.us/img302/3654/lw28le.png
http://img302.imageshack.us/img302/7690/lw31ws.png
http://img302.imageshack.us/img302/3470/lw44vw.png

now, i DO agree with you on the mem useage, but the rest of this makes no sense to me considering i use azureus which also runs off java, but i have absolutely no problems with it, thats why i believe that this has to be a LW problem, somewhere in the coding something was set wrong.

those images show exactly what is going on, so if you dont think its a LW problem, then what do you suggest i do? because i know my hardware and most everyone elses pretty well considering thats what im going to college for, which is why i would find it hard to believe this has anything to do with hardware.

so do you think i oughta revert back to an older version of java? if so wouldnt that be bad for azureus?

No it does not appear to be a hardware problem I did notice on the image where you show processes that LW is using 14% and task manager is using 14% but your total cpu usage is 93% do you know what other processes are eating up the cpu. I tried to duplicate by making diffrent processes start up the only way I could get the high cpu usage was to preforme several searches at once IE start/search while doing this explorer.exe got stuck in a loop after it had completed search and hoged cpu 93% I doubble clicked on explore.exe in the task manager window after about 5 min. and it droped back to normal. I see that explorexe.exe is at 0% on the immage you provided so there is another process running that may have a conflict with LW could you give a snspshot of task manager processes showing tasks running in order of cpu usage it might help the devolopers of LW figure the problem out.

Latter Grandpa

http://img303.imageshack.us/img303/9149/task9sc.png

there ya go :), the only thing is, is that im using every single program i used with limewire running even on my last machine which was an XP 2700, and everything is pretty muchly the same, thats the only reason i think it could be a LW problem, heh i suppose it helps with people actually posting images of what is actually going on with their systems, thats why i did it :).

i think that there is possibly some java error and thats just my opinoin, i think they should go back and skim the coding thoroughly and just make sure there is nothing wrong with it, because when making a program, thats what youre supposed to do ;). im not downing the LW team, everything has been smooth sailing up until now, and i think everyone feels the same way. i believe that it really is a coding issue, and its not like they should feel bad, everyone makes mistakes lol, coding is hard business :P, thats why i dont do it haha.

but hopefully all these images help!

Question, Not Complaint
 

It seems that when LimeWire first starts, it takes about 15 minutes before it fully connects to the Gnutella network. I'm the local network guru and my users are asking about it... I don't really have anything insightful to tell them. Could someone enlighten me? This isn't normal for most IP based servers or services. You can't get too technical in your reply.