Slashdot Mirror
BitTorrent Clients Reviewed
prostoalex writes "PC Magazine is running a review of several popular BitTorrent clients. They review uTorrent, an app that 'packs an outstanding array of features in 107KB, and doesn't even create a folder in your Program Files' and give it 4.5 stars. BitTorrent Client from BitTorrent.com, 'whose clean interface has three basic elements: a large progress bar for each torrent you're working on, a slider that controls your maximum upload rate, and a link to the BitTorrent Search engine', gets 4 stars. BitPump 'features an attractive interface that sacrifices a detailed feature set for BitTorrent tweakers in favor of simplicity and ease of use' and gets 4 stars. Finally, Azureus, 'a favorite with advanced users, who enjoy its plug-in system and huge range of tweakable settings', gets 4.5 stars. An interview with Bram Cohen from BitTorrent is available as well."
...torrent of the article?
Hey, I thought I'd forestall the jokes. You know, by making one. It's an advanced technique.
This is great. I've been looking for the best app to steal music, movies and software with! Thank you, PC Magazine!
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
Selectively remove unneeded files from an archive? Sweet.
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
Azureus, because my downloads matter. And, it works on a Mac. Plus, it has plug ins such as SafePeer to keep those pesky people away.....
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
screen + btdownloadcurses.py is all i need. Fie on your graphical programs. Fie, i say.
filter: +3. Hey, look! all the trolls went away!
Didn't find the article particularly insightful/interesting/unique... certainly doesn't rival the Wiki article on BT client options.
how can they review bittorrent clients for windows, without including BitComet (http://www.bitcomet.com? easily the best bt-client for windows
http://libtorrent.rakshasa.no/
best client out there. curses! nuff said.
I've used ABC; how does that hold up?
Does anyone find it annoying that every program gets only 4 or 4.5 stars? What is the point of reviewing 5 different programs if they all get essentially the same score? Azereus is by far the better client, yet it only gets an extra .5 stars for this distinction. Its features and usability are far beyond the others I've tried, and it's open source/java to boot.
This app shows why platform-optimized code will _always_ beat generic XP frameworks (Java/Python). There is no earthly reason a BitTorrent client has to be big and slow. I like Azureus (especially its DHT) but it drags my machine down compared to uTorrent (which you don't even feel is running). If uTorrent supported Azureus' DHT instead of mainline-DHT I know I wouldn't use Azureus at all.
[1.1GHz Pentium M with 512MB RAM, yes I know that's not a lot but I'd still like to be doing other things when my BT client is running.]
Go somewhere random
no bittornado? that's my favorite
but it seems it takes up a lot of CPU even if I'm only downloading one torrent. So instead I switched to ABC, which seems good enough for now.
Though I might definitely give some of the other ones in the list a go.
'For we walk by faith, not by sight.' II Corinthians 5:7
Amule is a now a good Bittorrent client for KDE. Much better that before. It doesn't crash now... hardly ever. When getting an MP3 (over my network) I find I get really nervous and end it as soon as it is finished thus not sharing too long. Bad user... I know but I want it for free you know. I don't want to overpay by thousand of dollars. OK no need to remind me that "I'm stealing" or the "it's wrong". Yeah yeah... I do it anyway... I'm weak and immoral... yada yada yada. Oh yeah! I like their Heidi Klum clip come on. Nice attention graber for the article don't you think?
Its disappointing to see that they managed to review a whole 4 clients.
I wish that they had discovered that there were a few more than that; ABC, BitCommet, BitTornado, etc... Especially since clients like BitCommet and BitTorrent have some features not posesses by the ones covered there.
Can anyone recommend a good website for Azureus plugins? (And, of course, their favorites)
www.GrenadeHop.com
But has anyone else noticed that the article itself is only about 7% of the visual webpage?
'For we walk by faith, not by sight.' II Corinthians 5:7
I know Shareaza isn't the absolute greatest bittorrent client out there... but it seems to work fine for me, and the fact that it's also a Gnutella2 and eDonkey client makes it just too damn good for getting all those 'latest and greatest' BitTorrent things, as well as those hard to find things you only get via other P2P networks.
:)
:P
Plus... if your tracker goes down it looks for alternat Gnutella2 sources... sweet.
Oh... and it's open source... that's good... right?
Azureus 4.5 BitPump 4 BitTorrent Client 4 uTorrent 4.5 My first experience with BitTorrent was pretty poor; I was using Cohen's original client and didn't realize I needed to bound my upload speed or else I would saturate my connection (for those unaware, you need some upload bandwith when downloading to send acknowledgment packets that show you recieved part of the download). Even then, I found BT cumbersome until I found Azureus which I still use today. Other popular clients that were not reviewed are ABC (Another BitTorrent Client) and BitTornado.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
There are a lot more uses to bittorrent than stealing media. I use bittorrent a lot, I have used it to play around with many distros and am using to download 4 cds of Slackware. I have never used to download anything that isn't free.
Bittorrent lets people without a lot of bandwidth get their data distributed, it just happens that some people want to distribute stuff they don't own.
I really like Azureus, even if I was a little hesitant when I first downloaded it. It's written entirely in Java which I feared would lead to a less efficient and more cumbersome application. However, if you use Windows and want a good client, go with Azureus. It's amazingly configurable and easy to use. The RSS feed plugin and great DHT implementation alone sell the program. The GUI is very well done doesn't feel like your normal Java GUI.
My only complaint is part of my original fear. The program is a little resource heavy when doing anything with the GUI, and sometimes even when it's minimized to the tray. I've also had trouble getting the desktop to refresh when unlocking the computer after it's been locked for anything over a few hours. This only happens when Azureus has been running.
Other than that, amazing program. How can you go wrong with a program that's always in the top 5 (usually #1-2) of the Most Active and Most Downloaded lists at SourceForge?
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
FTFA:
... ... it requires JRE (Java Runtime Environment) 1.5
The original BitTorrent client
hmm i don't think so
it's written in python
No coverage of ktorrent? It's still a work in progress, but 1.2_rc2 is a pretty slick kde application.
It's all free. The real question is: Is it legal?
Such delicious irony.
Suprised BitLord wasn't mentioned, I feel it is the best free Bittorrent client for Windows.
Duh! same as above but... Ktorrent is a now a good Bittorrent client for KDE. Much better that before. It doesn't crash now... hardly ever. When getting an MP3 (over my network) I find I get really nervous and end it as soon as it is finished thus not sharing too long. Bad user... I know but I want it for free you know. I don't want to overpay by thousand of dollars. OK no need to remind me that "I'm stealing" or the "it's wrong". Yeah yeah... I do it anyway... I'm weak and immoral... yada yada yada. Oh yeah! I like their Heidi Klum clip come on. Nice attention graber for the article don't you think?
The article claims that the official BitTorrent client, written in Python, requires the Java 1.5 runtime.
/dev/random
but that's a really great way to download files via .torrent when you have a server at home and don't want your main system (my laptop) be used for a torrent that'll be running for a few days. It needs to move around with me and .torrents prevent that.
BitTorrent Client 4.2 review:
.exe file, and leaving out all the other supporting files in the program folder. Damn, that's misleading...
"...This client is clean and simple; it requires JRE (Java Runtime Environment) 1.5."
Wait a minute... Mainline requires Java? O_o
uTorrent 1.2.2 review:
"Proof that a little bit of code can go a long way, Torrent packs an outstanding array of features in 107KB, and doesn't even create a folder in your Program Files. Azureus, to be fair, takes up only 151KB; BitTorrent is 184KB; and BitPump is 113KB--none of these clients is particularly bloated."
Azureus only takes 151Kb?? O_o I guess they're only looking at the
Seriously, how did this guy ever get a job writing tech columns. His "facts" seem to be closer to misinformation half the time. Geez how PC Magazine has gone downhill over the years.
/dev/random
I have to state that I strongly disagree with one of the comments at the end from Brahm Cohen. I mean, MS Avalanche is vaporware, but that doesn't mean that use of FEC (forward error correction) is a bad idea. Granted it would increase local storage requirements when seeding, but there would be almost no impact on network bandwidth and the CPU overhead is negligible. Personally, I'd be more than happy to sacrifice say a 10% increase in local size to ensure that I get a complete copy of the torrent. I've found numerous torrents that died out somewhere between 90 - 100%; And the worst is when you have a wasted download because you're missing only a fraction of a percent.
Personally, I would like to see a combination of the BitTorrent "send the least common block" approach and a selectable Reed-Solomon coding defaulting to around 10%. In my empirical experience that would clear up almost every failed torrent I've hit. Of course, it is an extendable protocol. Perhaps I should stop bitching and look into writing an Azureus plug-in to test this idea out.
Yuck.
I use Bitcomet now instead whenever possible. Sure it's not geek-friendly (no linux support), but it offers the same stuff as Azureus (that's file selection, advanced options) at a lot less RAM and CPU usage.
I am dissapointed not to see it reviewed here.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
I've been looking all over for something even remotely similar to BitComet 0.6 for Linux, since getting BitComet itself to work under Wine is a PITA. So far, I'm forced to boot into WinXP simply because of this, since my despotic ISP has started throttling BT traffic.
If anybody knows of *nix clients with this feature, I'd greatly appreciate hearing about it.
I've used BitTorrent's official client and Azureus and found the former too basic and the latter too demanding on memory. I've been using Bits On Wheels (http://www.bitsonwheels.com/) for about 6 months and I love it. There is a 3D function so you can see an interesting rendition of the torrent swarm. I don't know if this exists in other apps but it should, it's a nice feature.
switch to screen + btlaunchmanycurses.py. It is easier to manage. Set --minport and --maxport to the same port and you only need to open/forward a single port your firewall. (Do this and your d/l rate will increase dramatically.) The option --max_upload_rate can manage the traffic of all the torrents. Just copy your torrent files to a single directory monitored by btlaunchmanycurses. Delete the torrents when you are done.
Personally, I go for BitsOnWheels. It has a nice informative interface with a really funky 3D view of your torrent download, and it rarely gives me any problems. The only thing I have noticed about it is that it seems to develop a memory leak when downloading a torrent with lots of (as in thousands of) peers (say a Slashdotted torrent). Other than that it works well and looks kind of cool.
Personally, I have had almost no success with the latests releases of the official BitTorrent Client. It always starts the download and seems fine for a few seconds and then just stops receiving any data...
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
The problem is we all have a different idea of "better". I don't like Azureus at all- I find its user interface clunky and pathetically slow, because it's java, and it has a TON of "one person finds this useful" functionality; they missed the boat, and should have made a very thin client with plugins, but instead made a bloated client with plugins. A torrent with over 1000 peers will often peg the machine- and it's a 1.4Ghz G4 Mini- not breaking any speed records, but not a slouch.
Sadly, it's the only decent mac client. The official client isn't very good at managing multiple downloads and rehashes torrents every time you start/stop them or quit+reopen the program; same for Tomato Torrent, which also violates virtually every Apple Human Interface Guideline in the book. Both are just GUI wrappers around the python clients, which means they have great compatibility, but not so great "modern" conveniences like the ability to "pause" and such. Tomato Torrent can't even adjust upload/download bandwidth. If uTorrent had a mac counterpart, I'd switch in a second.
By the way: with virtually all bittorrent clients, you'll see much better transfer speeds if you make sure your slots get an average of about 5-6kb/sec each, more with bigger chunk sizes. On a torrent with 1-2MB chunks (ugh, please do NOT make these!) I have to set 2-3 slots max.
Please help metamoderate.
I completely agree... it's because myself and my wife use the other networks as well, and I like to keep things simple for my wife (and me)... there's no need to switch from one to the other, you can be getting torrents and other files from the other networks at the same time without trying to juggle bandwidth between two apps... it really is quite handy.
:P
And our torrents seem to come down in perfectly reasonable times for us... so... all is good.
It doesn't stop me from having Azureus on there for when I absolutely, positively need a torrent overnight!
How does uclient manage to pack so many features in just 150k?
Yeah, you're also supposed to be able to change the (desired; not always in-effect) priority of individual files related to any torrent, or so they say..
A horse can't be sick, you know, even if he wants to.
First half of the article explains why not to use bittorent the argument goes like this: You can get in jail! You can download nasty stuff! oh and by the way, you can legally download some crap sometimes(I'm not implying linux). Finally, when you get to the actual review you just want to run away as soon as possible.
And why BitSpirit wasn't reviewed, it's a popular BT client?
BitsOnWheels is an awesome client, and it uses almost no CPU when you leave the 3D display off.
From the article: "Proof that a little bit of code can go a long way, Torrent packs an outstanding array of features in 107KB, and doesn't even create a folder in your Program Files. Azureus, to be fair, takes up only 151KB; BitTorrent is 184KB; and BitPump is 113KB--none of these clients is particularly bloated." Wow, I didn't know that PC Magazine were so incompetent. Azureus.exe is indeed 151KB, but as they mention, Azureus is written in Java. All Azureus.exe does is launch Azureus.jar, which in its current state is over 6MB in size. Nor did they check memory usage, which on Azureus is roughly 10x that of uTorrent, at least. It's not uncommon to see Azureus sucking 50MB when you're not doing much, and after a few days that can reach 100MB or more. If they really thought that Azureus was only 151KB in size, the mind boggles what they thought was included in the 8MB download package. And they don't even mention having to download and install the 16MB JRE on top of that.
If you are downloading, you arent stealing, you are commiting copyright infringement at the worst ( remember some licenses allow re-distribution, so i wont make a blanket statement )
if you want to *steal* just go to your local store and leave with product with out paying for it. You dont need a 'app' to help you steal.
Would be nice for people to get it right once in a while, instead of continuing to spread confusion.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Once again, using BitTorrent in and of itself is not in the least bit illegal. Of course, neither is using a VCR to tape a television show. However, a huge number of people use BitTorrent to share materials that are copyrighted. The array is vast, from MP3s to first-run movies, and even entire seasons of TV shows zipped up into a single large file. And once again (say it with us), downloading copyrighted material without the permission of the copyright holder is illegal.
Replace BitTorrent with http, ftp or the web and you see how tiresome this kind of comment is. A huge number of people die driving. A huge number of people are murdered with pointy pieces of steel. A large number of people might not give the world's big publishers their money, with or without another internet protocol. The vast majority of musicians get ripped off.
Let me see if I can say it clearly. Sharing with your friends is not dirty. Cooperative systems add value.
People in the non free world just don't get it and covet all the wrong things. The value of source code is much greater than that of a binary file. The value of a live performance is much greater than a recording. A movie is worth about four dollars. What he values is something that's dead, things with greedy owners. The value of the internet is the exchange of free information, not dead stuff.
I've got a closet full of old crap he might consider valuable. I've got CDs, albums and tapes, which were worthless to me until I ripped them and stuck them on an sftp server. I've got shelves of DOS, Win3.1, Win95 and Windoze 98 software, all good for painful installations on obsolete hardware. The actual content made has been moved to free software systems when I was no longer able to access it with non free software. I keep it, some old books and even a working system or two around like museum pieces. The cost of replacement for my non free software is about 1 hour of install and download time, or a $500 trip to CompUSA. Mobility adds value to information and exposes the true value of non free information.
Will I use bt to share music and movies? Sure, if they are free. Those that are free are worth much more than those I can't share.
Do I share my own work? You bet I do.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I'm going to use these to download warez
Transmission is a bare-bones, ground-up rewrite in C and has really impressive performance. I use this as my default.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
... and nobody speaks about MLDonkey???
Update the JRE to the linked version, no more CPU problems.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Sounds like a Windows problem. Power management problems are notorious there. The version that comes with Mepis seems to work just fine if you can see out of your NAT.
The only problems I have with it are how Windozy it is. Using Java might make upgrades a pain. The program has a nice looking integrated upgrade module, complete with annoying bottom right screen pop ups, yuck! Will it work with apt? I don't know yet. If it goes away, I'll drop back down to btdownloadcurses until it works or I get another Mepis CD.
Overall, I have to agree that Azureus is a very nice program as are most things distributed with Mepis.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I've used this for some simple torentting. I don't want to have to keep X or an entire Windows box up 24x7. Being able to send requests from any computer in my network very easily is another requirement. TorrentFlux has met this for me, simple, web-based frontend to its python scripts.
I don't have enough hd space (and I'm too lazy to pop an extra hd in) on my 8 year old linux server for too many concurrent downloads to test that part of it, but it is simple enough to use for most things I do.
Anyone have any other really simplified, Linux server sort of apps for torrentting?
I like this program. So flexible. Good documentation for all the features as well. You can configure to optimize. Cool graphics of swarms. One nice thing: I chose an unassigned port and forwarded it to Azureus. Did not like to have ten forwarded ports in a known range as with Bitorrent. (Not enough of an expert to know how much this matters, but it seems a bit more secure.) Speeds seem good compared to Bitorrent these days. Noticed also that Azureus was the most common client in the client list, which is why I checked it out. Worked great with Star Trek New Voyages. http://www.newvoyages.com/ All the Linux DVD distros came down in a few hours. Much slower with some public domain movies I went after (few seeds/peers) but they came together.
So far no bad torrents or spyware. But then I stay out of dark alleys."No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
Can rTorrent do this? I don't see it mentioned in their manuals and Web site unless I overlooked it.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I've been a keen BT user for years now and rave on about it to friends when asked where I get some of my stuff from. Inevitably they're interested and go off and try it and I'll even send them a torrent file to get them started. However what happens next is that they complain of slow speeds or no seeds on torrents which I know are flowing well. The reason for this is always the same: port forwarding and not entering their external IP address (for some set-ups). As soon as I say, 'You'll have to edit your modem/router configuration slightly to get it to work' they'll throw their hands up in horror and there ends their great BT experiment. It doesn't help that some wireless systems move the internal IP assignment around via DHCP requiring port 6881 to be re-pointed again. That sort of stuff is simply beyond most regular users and they 'just don't go there'.
So for me, the issue is not clients (I use BitTorrent for OSX very happily as if it mattered) but the way the protocol handles NAT/DHCP routing - surely it could be automatic? If it were BT use would explode and we'll all get faster speeds as a benefit. Anyone know if that could happen one day?
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
This guy is almost on the mark... I, myself, keep the mldonkey daemon runnning in the background full-time. Then, I get KMLdonkey in my KDE desktop. When I log off, the daemon keeps running; when I finish some download, it keeps uploading for some time. It works in a lot of other protocols, but I mostly use it for bittorrent...
HTH
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
If you're really concerned about how much of your resources Azureus is using, change some settings. You probably have too many open files or too large a write/check queue. Options > Files > Performance Options. The write and check queues default to unlimited. Also, you may want to uncheck the box for "Cache downloaded data...".
it is un-necessarily bloated piece of software that i've rarely gotten to work on any OS and the times i had, it took a chunk of my memory to do what it needed. No more. (I've tried it on Win, Mac, and Ubuntu/Suse/Fedora)
Downloading one episode of Star Trek at a time.
That's actually due to Windows file caching, not Azureus. When an app like Azureus constantly reads from and writes to a number of large files, Windows tries to cache as much of those files as possible - and, over time (hours), will start swapping out running apps, system processes etc in order to get more RAM for the file cache. Then when you come back to the system, pretty much any activity at all (even a screen redraw) requires all sorts of code to get swapped back in again. This is despite having the "tune for apps" switch enabled.
In earlier versions of NT4, the file cache was so aggressive it'd swap out the very process that was trying to access the file - e.g. when simply copying a 1 GB file with the system, it'd keep trying to swap out the filecopy code and the copy would slow down drastically midway through.
Mind you, the file caching can easily be avoided by passing a certain flag when opening the file, but perhaps Java doesn't support that - or perhaps it results in too many HDD accesses in normal use. Who knows.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Fact: Azureus is a CPU and RAM hog. Now granted, give it enough CPU and RAM to work with and obviously you won't notice an impact on system performance. OTOH, try to play any recent 3d game while Azureus is busy, on virtually any system -- you'll find it quickly becomes untenable.
.. some recent changes to uTorrent (latest betas, http://utorrent.com/download/beta/) seem to have rocketed it WAY ahead of the pack in actual transfer completion times. Maybe it's just me, but I'm seeing 5-10x faster overall time for torrents to complete. This appears to have nothing to do with peak bandwidth and everything to do with how quickly uTorrent can connect to peers and begin downloading.
uTorrent does ~99% of what Azureus does, but somehow manages to do it all in a 110k binary, while having virtually no RAM or CPU footprint. (I'm downloading multiple torrents with it just now -- and it's consuming 0-1% cpu, 4,240 kb RAM in task mgr).
However
With Azureus I'm accustomed to 10-30 seconds for each peer to establish connection, and another ~10 seconds in the best case to begin actual data transfer. In contrast, with the latest uTorrent beta, I am seeing connections establish in 1-2 seconds, and data begin transferring roughly 1 second after that. The result appears to be that, while my peak transfer rate is about the same as before, uTorrent is managing to keep the average transfer rate consistently high throughout the download. This makes sense, since BT is all about connecting to and switching between peers constantly as it distributes the traffic load. If you've got a relay race going and all the runners are the same speed, but one team takes an extra 30 seconds at each handoff of the baton, you know who's coming in first.
I'd be interested in hearing if anyone else is seeing this kind of dramatic improvement.
http://utorrent.com/download/beta/
Will I use bt to share music and movies? Sure, if they are free.
Free as in speech, or free as in beer? If it's the latter, it's copyright infringement - meaning taht, yes, "Sharing with your friends" is, indeed, "dirty."
Those [music and movies] that are free are worth much more than those I can't share.
Of course they are. That doesn't make sharing them legal, nor right. If they're "too expensive", don't buy them and let the free market do it's work.
A jumbo jet is also more valuable than a ticket to ride on one. It's just that it's harder to "infringe" the jet than it is a copyright.
DATABASE WOW WOW
Here's another BT client called BitSpirit http://www.167bt.com/intl/
It's a GUI based client that looks good, and has a good amount of tweaking options available. I'm no BT master, but it looks like you should be able to configure it as you would be able to on the command line. I don't know if there are many other BT clients that have support for UPnP, which this one does. Handy when you want to randomize your port (which this client supports) and you don't want to go to your firewall to change the port to whatever the port was ramdomly chosen, as that's done when you start the client and the UPnP does the port forwarding for you. Works great with my wireless router (a D-Link DI-624).
OSX supports Java. I use both the official client and Azureus on it. The official client on Mac uses a different GUI than the other versions (PyObjC/Cocoa instead of wxPython/GTK), but other than that it's the same.
I would much rather spend $100 on a gig or two of RAM than ~$140 on a Microsoft Windows license just to use non-free software like BitComet or muTorrent. At least I can resell the RAM to a friend when I upgraded my memory again in a year or two (if needed).
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
go in to /usr/bin and you'll find the ever useful window(1) command. What a gem.. not sure how gnu screen compares :)
/. is good for you.
If I can't share it with my friends, it's not free.
If it's the latter, it's copyright infringement - meaning taht, yes, "Sharing with your friends" is, indeed, "dirty."
You asking me not to share with my friends is the dirty part and a good enough reason to avoid your work. A library is not dirty. A few copies are not a republication. The end of physical media is going to be difficult for people who think they own ideas because they put them on dead trees. Copyright has gone far beyond it's original intention and purpose of promoting the sciences and useful arts. People who insist that sharing is dirty should be shunned.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Azureus can use a single port of your choosing
So can all other bit torrent clients.
You can configure to optimize.
This sounds like a sales pitch (i.e. what the hell does that mean -- no one knows)
There is a bootstrapping problem with BT...
;)
To really use it properly, you have to download a commercial bittorrent client. You have to use a commercial client to download commercial stuff, or you're really only going half way now aren't you. All the other pirates would laugh at you and laugh *Arrr Arrr Arrr*
But how do you download the first bittorrent client, since you don't yet have bittorrent? Hmmmmmmmm...
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Okay I'll preface this by saying I'm fairly savy about the intended operation of Bit Torrent and I have read all the explanations at the bit torrent site.
When I run bit torrent I chronically notice that nearly all the time my upload rate grossly exceeds my download rate. I have a DSL with a 750K upload and a nominal 300K download rate according to DSL reports. I usually set the torrent client to mac connect to it's default of 4 peers, though I have tried 6 8 , 10 and 12.
Usually my torrent shows it poking along at 50 to 140Kb/s download and upload rate of 260 to 400K.
THis happens in nearly all cases. Even in situations where i'm only linked to seeds then all that happens is the upload rate goes to zero, but the download rate is stuck in the same low range.
So can someone please explain to me why this happens? That is to say, this thing is supposed to be roughly tit-for-tat (evenif that's not the exact alrgorithm under the hood). So I would expect that on average my my upload and download rates would be the same in a long term sense. The only way I can imagine this is not the case requires some unusual conditions. This would happen for example if there were an extremely large pool of people launching torrents, collecting the first few "freebie" packets from me then exiting the torrent pool. They would be leaching the upload rate but during the initial few moments when they joined have nothing to offer in return. You can't sustain that condition of course so their would have to be a constant stream of these short timers flushing through the system. I find this explanation implausible.
Moreover since I'm able to spew 40K up, I'd expect that occasionally I'd see 40K down just when events conspired to randomly favor me. Yet I don't
So someone please give me an explanation of why i see this consistently? It just makes no sense that the upload and download rates are not nearly equal.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
so you get home from whatever job you "work" at, find your check in the mail, and go and share it with all your friends huh? what a nice guy you are! and yes, i do fail to see the difference.
I'm not responsible for your personality problems or your failure to reason but I can explain myself.
In general, I do share my things with my friends. My computer is mostly useful for sharing ideas with others. My house, beyond keeping me warm and dry, is mostly good for entertaining others. There are, in fact, very few things that I own that are not made to do something useful for or with other people. I do, of course, get to set the rules for my own toys and that's an advantage of working.
As for software, I'm as happy to share my source code with the rest of the world as I am to share a recipe or grilling tip. There's much more in common between that kind of sharing than there is between sharing media and giving all your money away. Software is nothing but a description of a process. It's amazing that greedheads have made so much money concealing it's inner workings and pretending binaries are some kind of valuable voodoo requiring cross licensing, twelve story buildings, advertising, Armani clad heros and lawsuits.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I, too, use Bits on Wheels on my G5 system nowdays. The ability to visualize the traffic packets is not only cool-looking, but a useful way to see, at a glance, what's going on with your connection. If I see lots of outgoing traffic from the center of the "wheel" and very few packets traveling inwards, I know I'm in a situation where I've got more of the file than most of the peers. I can therefore expect it to take a LONG time for the xfer to finish,or decide it's time to "bail out" and try some other method of getting the file I'm trying to download.
rtorrent is what I use. I've found it to be very nice for almost everything I want. I wish it had a few more of Azureus 'bloat' features, like the built-in tracker and upload-and-host features, but it definitely does everything it should.
Combined with Naim and NZBGet, I'm in heaven. I found all these when my windows PC was down and I was forced to take my linux PC seriously for a while. (Hardware, no software problem.) Now, I have Cygwin installed and use a lot of the stuff I fell in love with on Linux in Windows. (Aterm, for instance.)
Blasphemy, I'm sure, but I get to play my games (Cedega was a nightmare) and have all my toys, too... Except Yakuake. Grr. Working on that.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
1) Many of the download files I've come across are WMVs that require a license (ie they seeded onto the P2P networks to generate revenue for the bastards that created them.
2)The other problems I've encountered is that the search mechanisms for BT that I've found have been exteremely limited. I've searched for a number of strings that on Kazaa or eMule would have turned up hundreds of hits. I found 0 hits on BT.
Am I not looking in the right places? Am I not using the right client, one that will let me pre-filter search results with files that contain DRM or at least by extension? Is there a way to filter out the bogus files as a group by reporting BS files for everyone's benefit?
oops boffed the link.
heres' the link
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
That site has no mention of any of the non-Windows clients for Soulseek.
Unfortunately the Wiki article doesn't include stability, which seems to be the major problem with bittorrent clients these days.
Azurus is a great client, but it had the annoying tendency to take down the entire system. I still use ABC for its simplicity, but it will occasionally lock your network.
Can anyone recommend a robust, simple bittorrent client (for windows, natch)... preferably one that can automatically grep RSS feeds.
The ______ Agenda
Thanks AC, I didn't know that.
r rent_show_less_DHT_peers_in_the_status_bar_than_Bi tComet_Azureus.3F
http://www.utorrent.com/faq.php#Why_does_.C2.B5To
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I'm not sure you quite understand. The article uses numbers. Numbers don't lie!
Explain to me why no one has written operating systems in assembly for 30 year then.
Au contraire. Please to see Menuet OS , and check out the miniscule resources required for what this OS does. Sure, high level languages can allow you to get things done much quicker, but the best assembly-based program will beat out the equivalent best high level language-based program, as I think MenuetOS proves pretty definitively. Finding equivalent programmers, however - there's the challenge.
I guess it took a good couple of years for the lemmings to figure out AOL wasn't the hottest thing too. Can somebody PLEASE tell me of one real benefit to having a slow, RAM-hogging, ugly, bloated piece of software (Azureus) over a tiny, resource-frugal, clean-interface client (uTorrent)? I swear, Azureus users are the same people who use those stupid, big flashy WinAmp skins that take up a 1/4 of the screen. All flash, no go. Azureus regularly uses between 50-85mb of RAM. I have NEVER seen uTorrent use more than 3mb. Both download files at the same speed on a properly configured PC.
.. does Azureus get 4.5?! It is a freaking resource hog. I have 384MB ram and it makes the machine unresponsive after a couple of days of execution.
"private" as in "registration required", but anyone can signup
A lot of the trackers that use bytemonsoon code have a hard upper limit on number of user accounts, and you can only sign up if you happen to show up the moment another account is deleted due to inactivity. In addition, they tend to have a rule that if a release's .nfo isn't on NFOrce.nl, which seems to carry only .nfo files from warez scene releases, then the tracker won't carry the release, and under the inducement test of MGM v. Grokster, this means the tracker operator may be liable for contributory infringement.
I'm a heavy user of podcasting, and I often find myself at the mercy of how fan communities that make broadcasts available. BitTorrent is increasingly popular as a publishing medium for fans (especially of talk radio) and I'd love to have a way to get these "broadcasts" to my iPod. My ideal would be a podcast client that was BitTorrent-capable - is there such an animal?
.NET developer, there are apparently only two relatively immature BitTorrent libraries (BTSharp and BitTorrent.NET) available.
It seems not, and it would seem a relatively simple matter to write one, but as a
Anyone using something effective to get torrents down to their iPod?
Not sure about its RSS integration but I find bittornado to have all the features I want whle not hogging resources/crashing.
:) ) so it comes down to experimentation if you're really picky feature-wise.
A lot of clients have some quirks (most are still in beta, and will probably be there forever
uTorrent can do the single port forwarding thing as well. I can't remember where the option is (I don't have it installed on this PC, I'm at work), but it's definitely there.
If your PC is more than a year or so old, I fully recommend trying uTorrent. You get almost all the functionality of Azureus, without the CPU/RAM hogging. On my poor old PC (Athlon 1800XP @ 1.49Ghz, 1G of RAM), I could pretty much only run Freecell and Firefox before my machine would start to struggle. uTorrent, by comparison, puts almost no load on the system. Sometimes I even forget it's running!
Azureus was definitely the best BT client out there a year ago, but I think it's day has done. Most people I know have switched over to uTorrent, and I'm seeing that the swarms I download from.
Looks like the number of Windows clients is vastly greater than the others. Guess that means that most "pirates" are Windows-users.
Hey RIAA, MPAA, there's a simple solution to your "piracy" problem: Have your pet Congress-creatures outlaw Windows!
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
I've never bothered with anything but Linux distros before. Have bookmarked that page, although I doubt I'll remember it.
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
This app shows why platform-optimized code will _always_ beat generic XP frameworks (Java/Python).
Neither Java or Python programs will run particularly quickly, this is true. However, it is *possible* to produce a fast cross-platform implementation -- it's just that no popular language is both fast and has a fast cross-platform runtime.
Native-compiled Java code isn't all that peppy either...
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
This is a problem that not only Bittorrent has, but all (P2P) applications.
Short answer:
If you are behind a router that does NAT (network address translation => you only have a local IP) and you do no (static) port forwarding, you can only share with peers that are NOT in the same situation. You can only share with peers that are directly connected to the net or do port forwarding, as you are only able to retrieve data from computers that you initiated the connection to.
Longer answer:
If you use P2P , among others you do two different things:
a) you look for peers that have the file you are interested in (by searching or connecting a tracker)
b) you connect those peers to download/upload data
After you have done the searching you have a number of peers/addresses to connect to; say you want to connect peer XYZ:
If XYZ is directly connected to the net (has a global IP address): no problem.
If XYZ is behind a not-forwarding router you can not directly connect him, since you can only connect the router that has the global ip address. The P2P app you actually want to connect to runs on a computer with only a local address in the LAN "behind" the router.
Now, depending on the P2P application/protocol you are using, there might be a way to tell XYZ to contact you to establish a connection.
For example: you could try to find someone that already has a connection to XYZ to tell XYZ to contact you on IP:Port. I don't know whether Bittorrent does something like that with the tracker (maybe it isn't even neccessary), but it seems somewhat obvious to track who can be connected and who can't and "suggest" peers accordingly.
You probably already see your problem now:
if your P2P app is "hidden" behind a NAT router too, even the "let XYZ contact me" method can't work since both of you have the same "I can't reach you behind your router" problem.
=> You can't share with a (probably) large number of peers, though you know they are out there somewhere.
=> All you "behind the router without forwarding" guys have to "fight" for the upload bandwith of the same (maybe few) directly connected ones.
=> It is slow instead of "no connections at all"
btw, it could be that even the statistics are against you: maybe more people with big upload bandwith are behind a NAT than directly connected.
This probably is true for countries like Germany, where almost all broadband for the more-likely-to-be-direct-connected home users is ADSL with a rather limited upload (usually 128k to 256k), while business networks with bigger (upload) bandwith are shielded by NAT/firewalls.
(Though the number of home users with NAT has probably grown fast here because of DSL-modem/router/switch/WLAN combos being included in DSL subscriptions)
Am I the only one who can't get the official client to download a certain number of torrents and then automatically queue them for download later?
Every time I add another torrent after the first one, it sits there without downloading and I have to tell it explicitly to download each one. If the first one finishes, the others will sit there and never download.
+++ATH0
Hey, I just wanted to say Great Sig. I miss my Commodore days. Take it easy, T
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come. - Victor Hugo
When I'm downloading gigabytes of presidential address footage, the last thing I want to do is encourage abortion!
Out of all the BitTorrent implementations, uTorrent is the only one using UPX to compress its executable. Data compression, particularly the unholy NRV (No Redeeming Virtues) algorithm that UPX uses, is focused on throwing away that which it finds redundant, replaceable and poorly formed. Sound familiar? These compression authors even compete as to who can throw the most away. I've heard abortion doctors keep such perverse scorecards as well.
Would I be surprised if Ludvig Strigeus, Markus F.X.J. Oberhumer and László Molnár were not only all liberals, but liberal abortion doctors no less?
I'm not that blind.
Don't Hate, Gestate
D'oh! Let's try that again.
Not really, because those settings depend on:
--Your hardware (disk capacity and speed, amount of RAM, and CPU power)
--Your OS
--What you're downloading (number of files mostly)
Some sweeping generalities and my settings, though:
Uncheck "friendly hash checking" if you have a modern processor.
Keep "max open files..." pretty low. Unless you're downloading a huge direcory of images or something, or have (for whatever, probably retarded, reason) dozens of torrents open at once. I have mine set to 100. Some people say to keep this high (1000-10000) if you're running linux, as "everything is treated as a file". This is true, but from what I've seen, this setting is just for downloaded files, not application files/sockets/whatever. Setting it higher than 1000 seems to make things unstable, at least in past versions. Mine is at 100 (Gentoo x86_64) and regularly getting speeds 450kB/s and peaking at about 600kB/s on an Adelphia 1.5MB/768kb cable connection. Apparently that's "awesome".
The next two options default to 0 (unlimited), I think. The first, "max outstanding disk block writes" will limit the amount of data that is kept in RAM after being downloaded before it is written to disk. The only reason you'd really want to mess with this is if your hard disk is slow (you're not running on a floppy RAID, are you?). Or you're a memory miser. If you want a small footprint and have a quick disk, maybe try setting this at... I don't know... 128-ish. That means the write queue (space in memory for temporary storage of fresh downloads before being written to disk) is limited to 2MB. But if your disk can't keep up, downloads will be put on hold. I leave this at 0 (unlimited).
Before pieces are written to disk, they are checked. If you have a modern CPU, you don't need to worry about the "max outstanding check pieces" option... unless you're a retarded memory whore. I leave this at 0 (unlimited), but if you REALLY want to keep Azureus from getting the most out of your system, set this at 10-50-ish. This limits the number of pieces able to be held before checking them. If complete, they go to the write queue. If you run out of room for your downloaded pieces to go because your CPU can't work quickly enough, your downloads will wait. Piece size varies greatly between torrents, so this setting has a varying... impact.
If you want to just read/write from/to files directly, uncheck "enable disk cache". This will have the single largest effect on memory usage. I have it checked. That means that my downloads are held in memory until it is convienient to write to my disk. That also means that what I'm uploading is held in memory, so that I don't need to access the disk each time I upload the same piece to a different person. This setting makes your system more responsive in exchange for a ("large", ~100-200MB) chunk of RAM. Unchecking this greys out the rest of the options.
Of the next two, one is explained in a paragraph next to it, and the other is obvious. Mine are set to 32 and 1024.
Check the first of the three boxes at the bottom. Its a no brainer. It'll pre-read the files you're uploading into RAM as you go, if your disk is idle. The second will use a buffer to reduce disk accesses. Check it. And unless you're having problems/developing, uncheck the last.
I know there are some options not available to certain OSes, but I've only used the latest Azureus from my Gentoo box.
I've been seeding about 20-Gigs for a week straight with Azureus, and my memory usage is only 1,820k.
It's not the program's fault if you're using it wrong (settings, plug-ins, your JRE, whatever...)
...Also, I didn't know Buggalo could fly.
I'm running it on a machine with a sempron 2.5 and 1GB RAM, and I'm running FC3. My ram is virtually always in full usage and my cpu load averages are always 1 +, basically because I also run Folding@home 24/7/365.
Even with that load FC3 still never uses swap and I can browse the net, stream media to my LAN and use any other programs without too much slowdown.
BTW, here's a list of the currently connected clients for information:
Azureus 2.3.0.6 Azureus 2.0.8.4 BitComet 0.60 Azureus 2.3.0.6 TorrentStorm 1.3.0.0 Mainline 4.2.0 Azureus 2.3.0.6 BitLord 1.1 Azureus 2.3.0.6 BitLord 1.1 BitLord 1.1 BitComet 0.60 Mainline 4.1.2 BitComet 0.61 BitLord 1.1 Azureus 2.3.0.4 BitComet 0.60 Azureus 2.3.0.6 BitComet 0.60 Azureus 2.3.0.6 Azureus 2.3.0.6 Azureus 2.3.0.4 Azureus 2.3.0.6 BitComet 0.60 Azureus 2.3.0.6 BitLord 1.1 BitComet 0.60 BitLord 1.1 BitComet 0.59 BitComet 0.60 Torrent 1.4.1 Mainline 4.3.4 BitComet 0.60 Azureus 2.3.0.7_B30 BitComet 0.61 BitComet 0.61 BitComet 0.57 BitComet 0.60 BitComet 0.60 BitComet 0.60 Azureus 2.3.0.6 BitComet UDP BitLord 1.1 BitComet 0.58 BitComet 0.59 BitComet 0.60 Azureus 2.2.0.2 BitComet 0.60 BitComet 0.56 BitLord 1.1 BitComet 0.60 BitComet 0.61 BitLord 1.1 BitLord 1.1 BitComet 0.60 BitComet 0.60 Torrent 1.3.0 BitComet 0.59 BitComet 0.60 BitComet 0.60 BitLord 1.1 BitComet 0.57 BitComet 0.56 BitLord 1.1 BitComet 0.57 BitComet 0.61 BitComet 0.59 BitComet 0.59 BitLord 1.1 BitComet 0.60 BitLord 1.1 Azureus 2.3.0.6 BitComet 0.59 BitComet 0.58 BitComet 0.61 BitLord 1.1 Azureus 2.3.0.6
If you are downloading, you arent stealing...
Whatever helps you sleep at night.
Attention deficit disorder is a complicated issue, spanning several major... HEY LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!
I've been using Tomato Torrent for a couple of months now since I got fed up with Azureus taking up so much resource. It's hardly fully featured, but it does the job without any fuss.
-= This is a self-referential sig =-
Using BitTorrent doesn't imply stealing. There are a great many very legitimate uses of BitTorrent. For example, you can officially download Sun Microsystems' OpenSolaris through BitTorrent. Mandriva Linux is distributed to its club members also via BitTorrent. There are official distributions of movies like Star Wreck done through BitTorrent. Very legitimate games like Blizzard Entertainment's hugely successful World of Warcraft use the BitTorrent protocol to distribute their patches.
It's because people like you confuse tools and acts that the French government feels it can follow the recommendations of artist organisations and push for implementations of controls in P2P tools such as BitTorrent, in the context of it's new DADVSI law projects.
I would like, here, to remind everybody who hasn't yet figured it out, that a hammer, while it can be used to kill someone by hitting them on the head hard enough, isn't considered a criminal's tool... and as such doesn't implement all kinds of ridiculous controls. Some of the users may be criminals... but there are very legitimate uses for a hammer... just as there are for BitTorrent clients.
So how many of these let you throttle their bandwidth use at all?
And how many of them ask how many people are sharing the same connection as you when you install 'em, and offer a default throttling that leaves some bandwidth for your housemates?
(she says, wanting to kill a housemate who leaves BT running constantly, eating all the upstream bandwidth of the ADSL line to the point that even simply web-browsing can be painful.)
egypt urnash minimal art.
I'm still looking for a CLI client that works in the background and can be easily used. Something like curl or wget for BT. Would be cool if I could set up a client in cron and whenever I drop a torrent file in a specific folder it starts downloading. Any ideas?
"That if you download it you may get sued. (Also true.) So download these things at your own risk. (Good advice, people should be aware of what they are getting in to.)"
No, no, no. Not a single person has been sued for downloading music, only for uploading. On top of that no one, to my knowledge, has been sued while using BitTorrent. It just would not be worth the RIAA's time because they could only sue for one piece of copyrighted work per person.
A blog about stuff.
I've been playing with an app I stumbled on to while looking for a podcast client alternative to IPodderX called IM (www.im.com). Seems its an rss/podcast client but has built in bittorrent support for rss feeds (although this isn't mentioned on their website. Not a real useful general purpose bt client, but for RSS it seems to use a fraction of the resources Azereus does on my box. Windows XP only though so no love for my Linux box.
Being a novice in the area of "filesharing", I have found Shareaza to be very simple and effective to run in default mode. Any comments on how it compares to the bit torrent clients?
http://georgiadis.googlepages.com/
Use mldonkey and forget all this crap.
Bittorrent, donkey, gnutella and almost everything you can think of in one place.
Modular in the UNIX way, with a pletora of nice guis.
The rest doesn't even come close.
In almost any review of software, failure to mention the licence terms {GPL, BSD, Other Free, Non-Free} is tantamount to a criminal omission. The only exception would be in a publication concerning itself only with one particular licence, or in a jurisdiction where the Four Freedoms are enshrined in law.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
...support bittorrents directly?
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
Dumbo newbie question, but how does one disconnect from an SSH session running a bt without canning it first?
The Original BT client already does this. Well, that's assuming you're using some type of 'nix.
Ops, I shuld have usd the prevuwe but in.
Anyone find it interesting that the article included bitpump in the review. Azureus is obvious in popularity and utorrent is a rising star, and the classic is a classic. But the article passed over tons of popular clients such as bitcomet, bitlord, shareaza, shadow, etc and chose this ... why?
d:-b ruce
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
Cheers,
b
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
Assuming you mean 450 KiloBytes (you did the ucase KB), and 1.5 MegaBits (you did ucase again, but I've never seen connections measured in MegaBytes/sec), that's not just "awesome", that's "impossible". I'll leave the math up to you.
On the off chance you really have a 1.5 MegaByte connection, then using 1/3 of it at any given time is less than what I'd call "awesome".
Karma: Poor (Mostly affected by lame karma-joke sigs)
Oops. My bad, I'm actually on a 6 Megabit/s down 768 kilobit/s up connection Don't know where that 1.5MB/s number came from. But 600 of (a maximum on a *good* day) 750 kB/s isn't bad, I'd say.
Did i comment at all about slavery? No.
Define patriot. Booth qualifies, regardless of any political theories. He was willing to die for his country and took actions in order to protect it.
There is of course room to debate if he was correct in his view, and actions that he took, but to deny that he was a patriot is wrong.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
MLDonkey is an all in one client for Bittorrent, Donkey, Overnet, Gnutella2, Gnutella, Napster, Soulseek, Fasttrack, etc., etc. What's more it can share chunks between protocls. If you'd just use mldonkey, there would be only one big p2p net. It has offical HTML, GTK2 and Java client UIs and there are a couple good 3rd party UI's as well. Personally I tend to use the HTML interface. It is faster for tunnelling over ssh. $ sudo apt-get install mldonkey-server
Most Azureus users aren't using it for its "plug-in system and huge range of tweakable settings" as quoted here... while these are nice, they're also comparable to features on other clients. The big difference is system resource consumption: Azureus can use 1/3, or as much as 50%, less memory than most other clients.
And it should be moderated as such, but if you are keen on the idea why don't you try posting an Ask Slashdot quuestion?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.