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Better yet, where the torrent tools?

My favorite is Azureus although it uses java and is a resource hog.

Original client--no bells or whistles

Experimental client with some speed controls

My favourite BitTorrent client uses them. Never seen them properly used anywhere else, but I like the fact it's now at least possible to make the point that you're using decimal multipliers. IMO the ideal would be to move to using "kilo", "mega" etc. in their SI senses and have new terms referring to binary multiples. But I suppose the crossover period would be prohibitively confusing, as when you saw a reference to "kb" or "Mb" you wouldn't know exactly how much data was being referred to. Oh, hang on.

I like the idea of Torrent, but it simply doesn't work.

Yes, it does.

The protocol is designed to make your download rate roughly proportional to your upload rate; however, when you start a file you have nothing to upload, so it lets you download for a while with no consequences. Shortly afterwards, however, it begins uploading rapidly in order to make up for that. If you were to leave it on for longer than 15 minutes, it probably would've began improving rapidly. Also, if you're behind a firewall, you should forward incoming connections on ports 6881 through 6889 to your computer.

Also, if you have a connection where the upstream is much lower than than the downstream -- such as a typical ADSL or Cable connection -- keep in mind that if your upstream bandwidth is saturated, you won't be able to download anything with any success. If you need to restrict your upstream bandwidth, try this alternate client. I find that a cap of 10 or 15 kB/s is good on a connection with 128kbps upstream.

Here's a bit torrent client that has upload cap control in the GUI.

I use it all the time and it works well.

Very simple.

Download the experimental Bittorrent client.

Go to Suprnova.org and check out what's new, or use Nova Search to look for something specific.

The advantages of Bittorent: swarmed downloads (if a lot of people are downloading something, the speeds increase); auto-verify downloaded pieces against a hash (no more fakes or poisoned files).

The disadvantages: easy as piss for other clients to get your IP (if you're worried about that sort of thing).

Check out the experimental client. It's a modified version of the official client that's lets you set the max upload speed on the fly. As of right now it's based off of 3.2.1b, not 3.3, but it works fine for me.

that is why you need the Experimental Release of Bit Torrent which allows you to cap your upload at a certain speed.

works great. :)

I normally get high speeds on "DSL/Cable fast", or if I'm already uploading stuff, "DSL/Cable slow".

Try out Bit Torrent Experimental. It lets you control how much bandwidth you want to devote to transfers. That's something I really wish the standard BT client would adopt. I appreciate that they want to help distribute files, but I need to use my internet connection for other purposes as well.

On the other hand we see how the traditional client/server system can break down if it has a significant user base and not enough bandwidth. The new Steam client hasn't allowed me to connect to a game since I installed it six hours ago. Who knows how much more data could have been transferred if all the Steam users were connected to each other and sharing their cache through a P2P network?

The next step in P2P would be to combine the swarm downloading of Bittorrent with a persistent P2P network like Edonkey2000. The Achilles Heel of Bittorrent is that it can only transfer one file at a time, and the only way to download multiple files is to open multiple instances of Bittorrent, which drains upload speed, a precious commodity among home broadband users. Some work is being done towards this goal but it currently deals with upload rates for individual downloads, and doesn't manage multiple downloads.

P2P is definitely the future, and I predict its popularity will continue to rise as more consumers sign up for broadband and start sucking down large media files like full albums and movies from corporate sites who aren't prepared for the broadband explosion.

The ability to do that is all built-in to the BitTorrent protocol. You just need a client which doesn't suck.

On Windows, I use this. I'm sure you can find equivalent clients for other operating systems with a quick Google search.

How does BitTorrent make you any more safe than any other filesharing system? In fact, I think it would be trivial for someone working with law enforcement to go through search sites like the one you just listed with a client such as this one and grab the IPs of everybody downloading the file.

The newest experimental versions of the BitTorrent client allow you to throttle your upstream usage.

I don't have the problem very often on my cable connection, but the one time I experienced a major BT-related slowdown, I was quite annoyed - so I can empathize with your hatred.

Here's the link to the experimental client:
http://ei.kefro.st/projects/btclient/

look here

The tracker already has all of this data. It has a count of how many people have completed as well as how many people are incomplete and how much they have left to go. (Like this, a CGI script that just reads the tracker's state file.) In fact, there's even a stats generator that makes pretty graphs out of it all. We're working on getting the UI elements to display these stats integrated into the core (example), but for now there are patches that do it. (Shameless plug.) To top it all off, the tracker generates log files that are plain old HTTP logs, and are parseable by pretty much any web stats generator.

If AOLTW/WB/etc ran their own tracker they'd have all the stats they needed. If you upload a torrent to a 3rd-party site and are the initial seed and want to see the stats, pretty much all of them nowadays let you at least see how many total downloads there have been. It's not an issue.

The experimental client addresses a few of these issues.

Other people have developed GUIs for BT. A quick google should provide the goods or there are a few options at...

BT Links

I use this

HTH

The experimental client has a rate limiter for uploading. This is awesome for people who are on broadband with an upload cap. If you set the upload speed to just under your cap browsing the web becomes tolerable again. The experimental client also a great statistics that tell you about the "health" of the torrent.

You should really download this excellent unofficial experimental client. It shows statistics for bytes tranferred and number of peers currently connected. Most importantly, it lets you throttle your upload rate so your upstream isn't completely saturated, which would prevent you from surfing the web on a capped connection.

BitTorrent does take a while get started, but you can usually get good speeds if you can manage to connect to a sufficient number of peers. It beats out other P2P systems for sharing large files because there are no queues.

Worse, the "advanced" BT clients let you change your upload rate. Part of the reason BT is so absolutely, amazingly fast is that it forces you to use all your upload, which pisses off the kiddie leechers who don't realize you gotta pay(full upload capacity) to play(maxxing out your download).