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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."
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.
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
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
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.
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?
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
/)
yes, in about 50 milliseconds...
no sir, didn't like it, not one bit.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The article claims that the official BitTorrent client, written in Python, requires the Java 1.5 runtime.
/dev/random
It's fairly shoddy. I used it for a while.
My main gripe with it is that whoever wrote it couldn't get multiple deletions from a list working properly, which is pretty darn simple. Try selecting three torrents in the list and trying to delete them. ABC will delete the wrong ones, because ABC modifies the array even as it is enumerating through it.
Say you had five torrents, V W X Y Z. You selected the first three, V W X and hit delete. V is deleted, and all the elements move up in the list (ie: their indexes change). ABC now deletes the item with index 1, which is no longer W, but X. Everything moves up, indexs change, and ABS deletes the item with index 2, which is no longer X, but Z. You tried to delete V W X, and ABC deletes V X Z.
So, no, ABC is crap. It's a GUI layer on top of the standard BT core written by someone who can't code.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
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
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
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.
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.
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
uTorrent is working on this right now. BitComet hasn't really given any information about their implementation, so ludde, the uT developer, has to do it from scratch. However, supposedly it might be released for other clients to implement. I say "supposedly" and "might" because I can't find concrete evidence on the uT forums right now to back this up. Azureus has also been working with their own header encryption which is in CVS. Check out the Azureus wiki for more information.
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"
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...".
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
I agree. BitSpirit is really worth trying. Azureus was just too heavy.
Though I warn to beware of spyware. Having made an update of BitSpirit, I noticed once some new crap installed. I'm not 100% sure that it was BitSpirit but since this software is a chinese product and the spyware was named like "4%-/5^@%65", I have a feeling that this might be the case.
Nevertheless, the client is great. No complaints and it does everything I need.
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.
I hear that this is a good place to check as well as here.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
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!
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.
Search at:
:P
mininova
piratebay
torrentspy
torrentreactor
If there's one thing Bittorrent is good for, it's quality releases.
Note it's absolutely useless for songs, odd files, small files, etc and the sort of thing Kazaa would find easily.
BitTorrent 'releases' are usually only for big stuff and have a very short lifespan. Torrents actually 'die' quickly so if you want to download Windows 95, for example, you would have trouble, as nobody has 'released'/re-released/reseeded it recently.
Stop grabbing those vague little 5MB porn WMV files with no feedback/comments and you won't have licensing issues
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.
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!
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.