Shareaza

Hi,
Windows XP SP3
Pentium 4 CPU 2.20 GHz
RAM 1.00 GB
Comcast Cable
ZoneAlarm Firewall (Shareaza allowed in all Inbound/Outbound)
Avast AV

Been a while since I had to post a new thread asking for help but, seems I'm having an issue with my Shareaza 2.5.5.0 that I just can't get to the bottom of.

Lately it seems that whenever I open Shareaza and do a search, the search will load a goodly amount of results and then, after a few minutes of right-clicking on a link or two for download, it will simply freeze and not allow me to do anything (Task Manager will indicate Shareaza - "not responding" on the Applications/Status tab) until a long time has passed looking at my hourglass cursor, perhaps as much as 20 minutes, until it unfreezes and is back to normal...that is, until the next time (in just a few more minutes of clicking) that it decides to freeze up again. Also, during this freezing my computer's CPU Usage (per Task Manager) runs at a constant 100%.

I've been looking for a link to the Shareaza Settings>Advanced (in Power Mode) tweaks that I found here once and I'm thinking that a tweak here and there in Advanced might help the situation but, I'm open to suggestions.

Yesterday I did a clean UNINSTALL of the Shareaza I had for a couple of years (v2.5.5.0), ran CCleaner, rebooted, and did a new installation but, the same thing happens with the newly installed program.

I've had the XP SP2 Patch EvID4226 for some time, even before these issues arose, and have had it set for:
concurrent half-open connections: 100

Don't know what else I can do, if anything, to alleviate this issue.

Thanks for any help or suggestions,
Gene

Well, there are several issues you should take under consideration - the first one being that I recall Shareaza and ZoneAlarm not liking each other in the past, so it really might be your Firewall causing trouble, even if it has been configured correctly. This can be tested quite easily by just disabling it completely, rebooting and seeing if the same problems occur with Shareaza.
An other reason I can see is that Shareaza does process incoming packets synchronously in the same thread that also refreshes the GUI. So while there are more packets that wait in the queue to be processed then can be processed in a reasonable amount of time, the GUI locks down. This might simply happen once results from an eDonkey server drop in, as those can come (depending on your search) by the thousands at once. As it is safe to say that your computer is quite slow, it's that processing that might as well freeze Shareaza for good. In order to avoid this, make sure you disable eDonkey in your searches (with the exception of searches where you do not expect many results to be returned from the beginning), as Shareaza will start discovering eDonkey sources for such downloads once they have been added to your transfers anyway, with or without these sources already being present while searching (as long as eDonkey is enabled, anyway).

As that's all that comes to my mind in reaction to your problem description (which I have really liked reading and answering to, as it is in sharp contrast to most requests for help I am getting to see here (Most of the time, they are basically not much more than: "I need help; your program is bullshit".)), would you mind reporting back if my suggestions did help fix your issue?

Pentium 4 is the first Intel processor being able to use SSE2 instructions (according to Wikipedia), so using SSE2 should be your preferred choice.

Well, I do get results from eD2k, so that part was obviously wrong...

I am seeing the same issue as cgreevey is. When a keyword search is made over ED2K no servers are queried. And obviously nothing is found. If you start a download and it has a ED2K hash then servers are queried for the file (although rarely) and new sources are found. I'd assume the reason most people are not seeing this is because most people have G2 enabled and searching G2 works just fine. Also if you get your links from a website instead this is hard to notice.

Regarding ED2K search, it seems to be an issue with only some (common?) servers.
Try updating a MET and testing different servers.

I had experienced the same issue on a modified Shareaza fork (2.5.5.0+) without luck until I found a specific server that searches flawlessly.

Not that this is likely to resolve the freezing, but is one less issue.
Assuming the debug builds have been of no use?

Makes sense. With the megaupload thing it is perfectly sensible for servers to switch off the relatively resource intensive string searching that could get them in hot water and just do the hash search instead. Everybody has Kad, right?

Global search should take care of this, but it hasn't really worked that well for years. And of course lots of servers get blocked by PeerBlock...

Verified that at least some ED2K servers have started only indexing the hashes... So it is not a Shareaza issue.

As for on topic, freezing a few minutes after starting a large search sounds like a search serialization issue to me. (Shareaza automatically saves your current searches to the disk occasionally.) So either there is something wrong with the drive/directory Shareaza is using or the P2P shield of Avast is spending too much resources scanning the data while Shareaza is writing it. Try temporarily disabling it. I actually have Avast and have the P2P shield disabled because it used too much resources. And that is on a quad core with 8GB of RAM... So it might be the cause.

If Avast P2P shield is the cause the easiest way to disable it permanently is to go to the expert settings for it and unselect Shareaza. If you just stop the shield Avast will nag about it.

Ok guys, I'm reviewing all your recent comments and suggestions and will incorporate them once I'm done with the initial setup. I've already downloaded the program and right now Shareaza is going through the "Shareaza is creating Hashes for...." phase (which is taking an awfully long time) and I don't want to disturb Shareaza until the file-hashing has completed.

I also note that, for the time being, I did NOT pass the Connection Test. But, I noticed that also on previous installations and I passed the test either upon 1) restarting Shareaza or, 2) a reboot. I'll know in a few minutes.

Interesting about the Avast P2P Shield...duly noted. I do remember the other day however, that was one of the things I tried when I disabled Avast for 10 minutes, restarted Shareaza and still had the freezing but, we'll see.

Thanks for your help!

Gene

BINGO!

Closed and then restarted Shareaza and PASSED the Connection Test. (I wonder if that should be part of the installation instructions?)

I'm going to reboot anyway, with a new program that's always a good idea.

Well, if disabling the P2P shield didn't help the other possibility that occurred to me was that you might be running WindowBlinds or some other desktop/window customization/skinning program. Those have had bad interactions with the Shareaza skinning engine in the past and most of your freezes seem to happen when interacting with the user interface in a way that would add or remove things that would be skinned.

Hello,

what have changed in shareaza search in the last versions???

with older ver, i used to have like 10-15 search tabs searching at the same time, getting sometimes plenty of results and never experienced freezing, while with 'recent' version (couldn't say when it started tought, 2.4?), it happens quite easily. i've also notice that browsing user files can lead to freezing

concerning ed2k searches, well they still work, mainly depend to what server you're connected but it is also true that at(most) time all i get is spam and g2 results (but here i will not put the blame on shareaza)
maybe it's time for shareaza to add some more p2p network??