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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."
Selectively remove unneeded files from an archive? Sweet.
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
Didn't find the article particularly insightful/interesting/unique... certainly doesn't rival the Wiki article on BT client options.
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
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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
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
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
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 ----
Like the grandparent says: It supports DHT, but the mainline version and not the one Azureus uses. Sometimes you'd like the be able to reach all those Azureus clients, since they make up a significant percentage of all users. I think it's still easily the best client, and from what I can tell a growing number of people seem to agree.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
The review is incredibly misleading about this, it claims that "Azureus, to be fair, takes up only 151KB; BitTorrent is 184KB; and BitPump is 113KB - none of these clients is particularly bloated". I'm not sure quite how they worked this out, as Azureus takes up a lot more than this.
http://slyck.com/guides.php
Its one of the only sites I know about that lists and reviews clients for all the major P2P networks.
Guide to the Newsgroups
-- Guide to Grabit
-- Guide to Agent
-- Guide to Xnews
-- Guide to WinRAR
Guide to BitTorrent
Guide to eDonkey2000
Guide to WinMX
Guide to DirectConnect
Guide to Ares
Guide to Gnutella
Guide to SoulSeek
Guide to IRC
Guide to MP2P
In all of the "Guide to" sections, they have a list of clients (Win, Mac, Linux) and they order them by rating. It's the site I send people to when they ask "what client should I use?"
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
DHT networking is a truly peer to peer protocol meaning you are slightly safer with your illegal downloading from the aut[h]orities.
WRONG!!!! In order for you to download content, you must be able to find other peers. And likewise, other peers must be able to find you. DHT does not magically make this requirement disappear. It's actually easier to find peers within DHT because there's no restrictions on accessing the swarm. With a private tracker, one must access that tracker to find the peers within the swarm. With DHT, anyone can find the peers for a swarm. DHT is more easily monitored making it much more dangerous.
The entire problem with BitComet was it's turning to DHT when the tracker was unavailable despite the torrent being marked as private. Some may call that a bug. But those that know bitvomit will suspect it was intentional...
You are completely mistaken about the reasons for a private tracker... illegal content is just as easily found on public trackers as well. The motive for a private tracker is fostering a community where people give back instead of take, take, take, and take some more. Remember suprnova, where there were swarms with thousands of peers yet the best anyone could download was a few kbps? Yet even on small "private"[*] trackers where swarms are just a few dozen peers (at best) download speeds were hundreds of kbps.
[*] "private" as in "registration required", but anyone can signup
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...".
BitComet cheats:
BitComet incorrectly uses DHT on private torrents/trackers, even ignoring BitComet's user's settings NOT to if the tracker briefly goes down!
BitComet deliberately misreports upload and download amounts to trackers and seeds in order to get the "lion's share" of upload bandwidth from seeders.
(Others have said that using super-seed as a seeder often takes >200% of the torrent's size to create other seeds due to BitComet's cheating-by-default.)
BitComet disconnects and reconnects to download more than is fair via optimistic unchoke -- (which is meant to give new arrivals something to share. Sadly, Azereus is reported to do this too. Automatically droping working connections is hostile activity -- it creates lots of churn which costs extra bandwidth for trackers and peers alike.
BitComet seems to favor uploading to other BitComet clients, even when getting faster download speeds from other clients. The most extreme case was a private tracker/torrent on a huge college lan with "100mbps" connections -- the person who did this could download at >5mbps if using BitComet but only ~5-15 KB/sec if using Torrent.
The only item fixed so far is #1 DHT flag, it's supposed to be fixed in version 0.61 released 13 days ago, the failure to respect the DHT flag has been known since March 2005...
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
BitComet deliberately misreports upload and download amounts to trackers and seeds in order to get the "lion's share" of upload bandwidth from seeders.
I use a private tracker that tracks your share ratio (and my own tracker for transfering files on my LAN), if BitComet lied about the amount it uploads or downloads I'd know about it (and the private trackers would be up in arms about it). Perhaps it lies to seeders or other peers, but I find that unlikely and I am 99.5% sure it doesn't lie to the tracker.
BitComet disconnects and reconnects to download more than is fair via optimistic unchoke -- (which is meant to give new arrivals something to share. Sadly, Azereus is reported to do this too. Automatically droping working connections is hostile activity -- it creates lots of churn which costs extra bandwidth for trackers and peers alike.
I can't confirm or deny that, but if one client does it then the others almost have to follow suit to maintain a similar download speed (which is all most people care about). It may be hostile, but it looks like its becoming a de facto part of the standard, if BitComet and Azureus actually do this.
BitComet seems to favor uploading to other BitComet clients, even when getting faster download speeds from other clients. The most extreme case was a private tracker/torrent on a huge college lan with "100mbps" connections -- the person who did this could download at >5mbps if using BitComet but only ~5-15 KB/sec if using Torrent.
Well, perhaps that has something to do with the various extras BitComet implements. It can defeat both NATs and packetshaping. It also spreads peer information between tracker updates. So obviously it should download faster than clients that don't implement these features. The example you mention was probably a firewalled college student (like my connection). Without incoming connections you usually won't exceed 20 KB/s, but with BitComet's UDP NAT Bypass (only works with other BitComet users) your download proceeds almost as well as someone who wasn't restricted (in a college user's case it can jump from 10 KB/s to probably 2 MB/s or more). Of course, that's the main reason I support BitComet, if you are behind a firewall it can turn a three month download into a three day one, so it helps some people a lot if you run BitComet. Also, it only uses ~15 MB of RAM plus its disk cache, so it's not wasteful like the Java VM and your computer won't lag with all the harddisk activity if you have a decent connection. (Try downloading at ~100 KB/s on a 5 GB torrent onto a USB 1.1 external drive with Windows XP for an extreme example.)
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.