lw slowing down my mac; eats up too much ram! Brushed Aluminium skin the cause!

[jkonrad]

I only have 17 shared files and I was trying to download two. However, I'll try it again. What do you mean new account. Do you mean a new user in OS X?

Jon

[edunc22]

I have the same problem. I can only get my connection to fair or good. For a couple of seconds it may be at turbo charged level. I can download two files at once. My mac is less than a month old and it runs like an apple II e when limewire is open. LW keeps going all the way down to "starting conneciton". I am sorry that I purchased this, it has been so great in the past.

[Lord of the Rings]

Originally posted by jkonrad
What do you mean new account. Do you mean a new user in OS X?

You can set up a new user account in OSX anytime. You can also delete user accounts very easily on condition you're the admin of the computer.

System prefs > System > Accounts & press the lock icon & enter your password. Then press the + & you can add another user account. Then re-login into the new virgin user account. This account won't have the complications of previous user account preferences, etc.

edunc22 did you configure your OSX firewall if you have it active & did you enable UPnP on your modem/router? Instructions here Connection problems? Check here first! (click on link) For you it might also be worth deleting your LW preferences folder whilst LW is closed; it's found here /Users/your_username/Library/Preferences/LimeWire
It will mean resetting your options next time you open LW, but it may just give your LW a fresh start. Also it's best to delete your LW prefs after updating to pro. Also check the tips given in my previous posts above.

[jkonrad]

Thanks. I am aware of how to make user accounts. However, I wasn't sure this is what you were instructing me to do. Although mac's fast user switching is fun to watch, I still would not go through the hastle of switching in and out of my account just for limewire. I won't bore you with the customization details of my current account, but they are difficult to setup and time consuming to reproduce. Since I've heard quite a few complaints from other users I am somewhat confident that Limewire will attempt to fix this ram sucking trend.

[Only A Hobo]

I'm not sure if you saw this thread

http://www.gnutellaforums.com/showth...threadid=53209

and the links within it

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301380

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107918

perhaps they will give a bit of help .. please let us know

[easterhay]

There's a thread doing the rounds which suggests OsX users should not use the Brushed Aluminium skin for LW 4.10 if they are experiencing system-wide go-slows when LW is open.
I had the very same problem - everything grinding to a halt the instant I opened LW. Changed the skin, problem solved.
My connection is still a disaster, but at least my system is no longer affected.

[Sobe]

I cut down my shared files from 2k to 45 (was searching for specific vids, so I shared the ones I had to make sure I didn't dupe the files).

I no longer lose ALL my memory and I do NOT experience a slow down.

I do not enjoy sharing only a few files, but I will until LW fixes their memory issues.

[Blade Blade]

The greatest help for me was always reset my modem. I have noticed two major issues with speed problems:.

1) The first one occures about 2 minutes after I start up LW. I have a system monitoring program and it shows about 2 minutes into running LW, it starts to read the hard drive with 7-8 MB and this of course instantly kills download speed. Have you also noticed that when you first start LW it runs fast, then it speeds drop all the way down, then they start to climb back up again? When I first start it up, for the first two minutes I get 40-50 kbps speed per files even just from 2-3 hosts. Then when the read happens, all downloads go down to 0, then they never recover to more than 10-15 kb/s even from 10+ hosts. If, however I unplug my modem at this point and restart it about 10-15 seconds later, download speeds go back up to high again.

2) Even after modem resets the speed will drop down gradually, this could take about an hour or sometimes even more. At this point, once again, I unplug my modem, then plug it back, the network speed is all reset.

Now, LW does not just affect itself with the slow downs. It affects the entire network, because when LW runs slow, everything else (e-mail, browsers ... etc.) begins to struggle as well. Even when I only download 2-3 files at 10-15 kb/s, everything else is slow. However, after I reset my modem and downloads are back up to 30-50 kb/s, my internet will works fast again. Plus after LW slows down and I quit it, my network speed comes back in a few seconds.

I also tried using another downloading program for testing, downloaded files for about 1/2 hour and it never slowed down, neither did my internet connection ever experienced any drop in speed. My network monitor indicated a full bandwidth use all along.

I still believe there is a glitch in LW somewhere, for no other program causes this slow down.

* My system: G4 dual 533Mhz, 1 Gig RAM, OS 10.3.9, DSL 1.2 Mb/s, LW 4.10.9.

[Lord of the Rings]

Originally Posted by Blade Blade

Plus after LW slows down and I quit it, my network speed comes back in a few seconds.

OSX Java is very much to blame here. It's not as efficient as the other Java's. Mac do their own implementations of Java which is the pity. I noticed improvements after upgrading to Tiger & updating Java to 1.5. But that was on my system. Other people didn't notice such a big improvement. But still 1.5 has problems but not quite as bad as 1.4.x

Reducing shares but more importantly keeping incomplete files to a small number makes a major difference to how LW behaves. Having over 2,000 shares is risky on OSX with this issue.

[stief]

The LW vm problem has been around for a couple of years. See http://www.gnutellaforums.com/showthread.php?t=29871 for charts.

The LW devs and open source folks (like jum and rogerk) are aware and have tried to duplicate and narrow it.

I checked it again yesterday, and the vMem climbed up over 1.2 GB and turned my G4 iBook sluggish using java 1.4.2 and the SVN LW version.

However, I was surprised to see that switching to the betaPro4.11.0 and using java 1.5 (OS 10.4.6 allows setting which java to use in Utilities/Java), the vMem has remained below 1 GB after more than 18 hrs running as an UP.

So, if others can switch to java 1.5, see if that helps

LimeWire 21.80 %cpu 31threads 188.57 MB RAM 741.56 MB Virtual Memory