LimeWire 5.0.0
 

So when is LimeWire 5.0 coming and what changes are to be added, like new GUI and what else?

i don't know, i just hope it has a new look.

What kind of new looks would you like to see?

Something really good, i dunno really, just because the same simular GUI has been used in LimeWire for a very long time, just thought it would be time for a change?

Why change what works? We get lots of praise for having a simplistic and easy to use interface. If you have ideas on what we can improve, add, remove, change, etc... let us know. Otherwise, we're pretty happy with how it's working.

I have been thinking about uncluttering the interface, especially for smaller screen estate as found on non-developers machines.

The main gripe I have with the current interface is how cramped the initial screen is with search input, search results and current downloads. It has gotten fairly compressed if you think about how the screen switches from search input to current query filtering. At least a non-technical friend of mine was fairly surprised about the sudden screen change.

My idea would be to reorganize the tabs slightly to ease up the pressure on the initial screen. The initial tab search should be confined to entering new searches and should not display any results nor current downloads. It should be renamed "New Search" to more prominently describe it's function. A second tab should be named "Search Results" and should hold the table currently on the top right of the current search tab exclusively, with the filter panel on the left permanently and contextually dependend on which of the sub-tab for the current search result is selected. The monitor tab should hold both the current up and downloads, I consider the incoming search display obsolete by now and if it is to be kept at all it should be on a tab by itself that is hidden by default.

Am I off track with that idea or does it sound reasonable?

Moving downloads away from search results is a long-standing issue of contention in the interface. I'm pretty certain LimeWire is the only P2P program that has the two in the same tab. My personal thoughts on the design waver back and forth every few months. However, with the introduction of the 'downloading', 'save', and 'incomplete' icon on search results, it might be okay to move them to a separate tab.

Keep in mind that absolutely anything that changes this drastically would need to have a way to keep it the same. For instance, we could introduce a 'Wizard' mode and a 'Classic' mode -- much like WinZip has. Or, in 'Classic' mode we could have a preference that moves downloads into the monitor and moves incoming searches into the Connections tab (or some other unknown place).

As far as having a separate tab for New Searches & Search results... I'm not sure how I feel about that. It'd be very strange to auto-switch tabs after enterring a search, and even stranger to not show the results after searching. If downloads are gone from the search results, though, the filters can be above the results (like they are on iTunes).

I was not entirely sure about the this seperation myself as it is a quite radical interface change. But on the plus side it allows the ever growing special metadata search area to grow without any messy scrolling. It would also be possible to add shortcut buttons like clearing the autocomplete cache at a prominent space and would allow to make the cache permanent. And not seperating new search and search results does not really ease up the compressed first screen at all as it does not resolve the conflict of the filter area with the search input form.

Is this going to connect to some other network like g2 or neo network?

limewire should be multi-network

Zin: no
bobo8e: no

If all clients were mutlinetwork, you people would realize that anything you would try to download would be downloading slow as molasses (if you are even able to download...) and you would say that P2P sucks. Get real. Best clients are always those who stick to only one network and try to improve it.

:rolleyes:

haha, it seems that bpmax still knows the address of this forum :p

Nice to see you here

I would like to see lower cpu load

Good news: LW is currently implementing the Java NIO technology for LW, this means:

LW will use less memory and CPU, especially when running in UP mode, but also as a leaf.

Reaad about NIO here: http://mindprod.com/jgloss/nio.html

I've been wanting NIO for 2 years now! Great news!

Ciao

Edit: Ha, I understand bpmax, here in the north, there is still no new grass to eat :(

Well, the NIO we're doing right now is more of a load-test. It uses NIO internally, but everything else remains the same (two threads per connection, etc...). We're going to put out a beta with that, just to work out the bugs and idiosyncracies with the NIO classes themselves. Then we'll work on reworking the core to use a single thread and use NIO as it's meant to be used, which will drastically reduce the memory footprint, etc.

Sam: I'm sure you've heard about Credence, but what is LW stance about it? Are you thinking about merging that project with LW or are you going to use your own system as you previously talked about at The GDF? I believe a Credence like option via LW is essential to fight against spoof and mislabelled files.

Ciao

We're talking with the Credence guys.

Merci, keep us informed...

Suggestion: what about a LW developper blog someday on the Limewire.org site? That would be useful to understand what's going on with the project and what LW devs think about anything ;) (judging by Zlatin comments at slyck.com, it could be funny like hell :D)

Ciao

I dont mind its current Design & look for LW, i recon that the client is stable that only work should be done to the netowrk & infostructure & when the point in time comes where the structure is stable enough & more High-Ended then it was before the you release version 5, also i agree with the statement about not using malutiple networks. I belive if we were to see LW use other P2P Networks that LW would be seen as a add free version of ares.

yup.


I, myself try to keep the cpu load down by removing all but one tab & boost the exe w/ a batchfile (start /abovenormal Limewire.exe).
Since lessening cpu load IMO would help the whole of the G1 community, I think an entry under the advanced sub-cat for "extreme mode" or something to that effect would be nice.
LW's already hella fast, but why not kick it up a notch via GUI mods, right?
I haven't tried it yet, but I guess I could use Res-O-Matic & see if it'll run LW in 16-bit color.

I'm just hoping that Java can make a uttility to lower the ammount of RAM it chews as we all know it isn't very ram efficient.:(

i agree with both of your points. i still feel the effects on a amd 1.3 mg processer.

you mean Gigahertz?

fast forward button
 

You need to add a fast forward bar to the player. Such as the thing used in WMP and iTunes where it moves along to tell you were your up to and you can jump forward in the song. Then i would actually use the player

Lower cpu load
 

Hi there!

I am using Limewire on a 10mbit (->1mb/s downstream*g*) connection with a lot of paralell downloads, but even my 2.6ghz machine has a load between 2-5 on Linux.
(-> a 5ghz machine would be needed to process everything).

I've tried different JVMs (Sun client,server ; JRockIT; IBM) but the server-jvms (all except sun-client) seem all to produce more or less the same results.

so lower cpu-load is definitivly something I am really interrested in ;-)

lg Clemens

Re: fast forward button
 

Yeah the player needs to be updated...that and startup time are probably the biggest things for me.

Hmm..
 

Totally agree here, I think nobody uses an player integrated in p2p software for more than just listen into a few files.

This all-in-one approach has several times prooven that it does not work very well...

lg Clemens

The LW player will be better in 5.0, you should see how when there is a 4.9 beta (I don't want to poil anything, but you can look at CVS commits) ;)

Ciao

NIO is already in alpha-tests for developers only.
There are still a fews things to correct, notably to find a way to detect that the host has no active connection (because NIO is not blocking and now LimeWire first attempts connections with UDP without waiting for a reply, nothing happens for long; there shoudl exist a watchdog to detect that some time has elapsed, so that the connection attempt is marked unresponsive; this code existed in the previous non-NIO based blocking code, but converting it to non-blocking NIO is still not perfect.

This just means that if you have no internet connection, with the alpha version, you won't get any notification with an alert box advizing to check your internet connectivity, and LimeWire stays for now indefinitely and silently in the "Connecting..." state until a connection is available. If you have Internet connected, then nothing seems bad, and Limewire is incredibly faster and uses much less CPU and memory paging to disk.

There are still some work to do to optimize the memory usage in Untrapeer mode, but the progress is still significant (for those users that have Java 1.4+; NIO is not available on MacOS Classic that just has Java 1.1.8; but MacOS Classic never qualifies to host a servent in Ultrapeer mode, so this is less a problem).

Windows users that still have Java 1.3.1 with an old version of LimeWire will really need to upgrade now to Java 1.4 to get NIO support and benefit of the improved performance.

Great!
 

Thats really great!

Because on a P4-2.8Ghz Server with JRockIT and 1GB ram I get funny:

shell>cat /proc/loadavg
63.86 48.41 33.75 1/1320 20071

just because limewire is running ;-)

What is JRockit? is it a Java 1.4 compliant JVM? Does it have NIO?

Also ask your self about why you don't use the Sun JVM for your Linux.

There are some JVMs that are "rocketing" only for pure GUI applications, that handle very littel numbers of active threads, because they compile all the code into native code, but then have a pure and slow memory garbage collector that takes much CPU ressources, if there are lots of memory operations, like in networked applications. Also these alternate VMs often have a slow multithreading support (switching threads is costly).

The performance of LimeWire does not depend much on the GUI, but most certainly on the networking components that DO need a efficient memory management in the VM.

Hmm..
 

JRockIt is the JVM from Bea, it is certified to be java-1.5 compatible and is heavily optimized for Intel/Linux. (Has NIO)
It can also choose the GC is uses at runtime, and determinds the algorythm best suited for each use...
I use it since it outperforms the SUN-JVM (server) by about 30% (also with Limewire) and as you can see I need every cycle I can get ;-)
Sun client-Jvm does really bad when it comes down to highest load...

I have to admit that I hacked LimeWire to run batched, since it runs on an webserver withought XFree (but a dummy X11), so I start every 500s a new search, wait 200s and start downloading all results.

Seems like Limewire was not designed for this, I end up with thousands of threads and extremly high loads...

No the core was not designed to perform so many searches and downloads at the same time (200 if you download all results!)
So your case is not what actual users of Limewire experiment, because your client is not Limewire (even if it uses its core).

Are you doing that spy on the content available on the GNet, given a list of copyrighted products? Are you working for a company that sends thousands of fake results to defeat the downloads on Gnutella?

Hmm
 

Well, I just hacked the GUI a bit - its Limewire with auto-called event-loops (of course through SwingUtilities ;-)).

No, I am just what some folks would call a "script-kiddie".
I just use it for myself, no bad big company behind me paying me $$$ for destroying something. I really like the Gnutella net, I do not want to destroy it ;-)

lg Clemens

What I'd like to see in limewire above faster load times and lower cpu utilization would be to allow music being downloaded to be streamed to players like itunes and WMP. (using an mp3 stream or somthing similar)

Error message Alerts
 

Maybe I experince this due to some fault of my own, but it's annoying and I would love a fix someday.
While I'm at school and using the university network connection, periodically the network with bottleneck or get restricted from overuse or administrator action. The problem is that I will get an error message when my hosts all drop out, telling me that a firewall or network is holding up my traffic.
Well be that as it may it's something I have to deal with, but the unfortunate part is that I get not only one of these messages, they begin to pile up fast. Even when LW is running in my dock/background(I'm using Mac OSX{10.3.9}) LW will pop up to alert me of this problem, however the application itself won't actually come to the front, only the top alert, forcing me to manually select LW.
On a bad day, especially if I'm not here to disconnect LW right away, I can get a stack of these a mile high which makes it impossible to access LW since the alerts superceed any other action, meanwhile more messages pop up.
If alerts could pop up not as a dialog box, but maybe in a scrolling window which could be ignored or at least moved, much the way Java errors come up in my browser.

Just my wish.


As an aside, I like that my downloads will continue even when I disconnect from the hosts on some occassions. More support to those who may be stuck behind a firewall or network not of their own would be greatly appreciated. I can't directly connect to my roommate but I can search and come with with results with his files, and then browse his computer.

This is a java issue and I don't know if you can fix it:-

No probs with my ATl video card. I upgrade to Nvidia and the display of Java apps is affected by my antialiasing settings. The higher the setting the worse the display...on the higest I just get a gray box.

Need to mess with the AA settings alot now :-(

Here's an Idea for the next version
 

How about having the download page and the search page seperate rather than split in half. That would make it easier I would think to scan for what your looking for and be able to more files at one time.

Port filtering
 

I would like to see the ports changed if possible. My ISP, in their infinite wisdom, has started filtering non-standard ports.

This will probably happen to more and more people as other ISP's follow suit. And it does suck. Cable Modem with a download speed of only 3 or 4K, when it used to be 20 or 30k.

Ackerman you can use almost whatever port you like ... some you can't. If really desperate & only as a last resort you could use port 80 but this is a http port & would mean you wouldn't be able to browse at the same time. Alternate ports: http://www.gnutellaforums.com/showth...threadid=24523

LOTR, you cant browse from your computer on port 80, you browse port 80 on servers, clients dont, and usually cant due to OS security use any port under 1024 unless its a daemon. the ports chosen are random unless your using a proxy with your browser.

Thanks ultracross I didn't know that. ;) :) :cool:

The New LW must have support for the new OS Win x64 Edition to.
The Current One now stuffs up when using x64 Edition.