BitTorrent Clients

[Board of Command]

I've been using Azureus for well over two years and have grown accustomed to it. Even though it's an enormous memory hog due to it being Java-based, I've stuck with it due to its great interface and features. Well, I've just had enough of its memory issues that I decided to try something new.

Yesterday I discovered. utorrent (http://www.utorrent.com/). Up to this point I have really neglected every other client out there thinking Azureus is superior regardless of others have to offer. utorrent is a fairly new and low-profile client that has been overshadowed by the likes of BitComet, ABC, and of course, the king of the BitTorrent world: Azureus. I just loaded up a torrent in utorrent, and wow, to my surprise they literally stole the interface from Azureus.

I'm not saying that's a bad thing, because I like it. One of the big reasons for keeping Azureus is that I don't want to switch to a new interface. Well with utorrent's plagiarism I don't need to adapt to a whole new GUI. So far I'm very, very impressed with utorrent's functionality combined with a rather simple design. The best part of all: the entire program is 140 kb and uses only 13 mb of memory when downloading at full speed (300 kb/s for me). That, in my opinion, is truly phenomenal.

I think I finally found a solution to Azureus's fundamental flaw. I think if more people would just give this a try, utorrent could really top Azureus as THE client to use for torrenting. This program is simply fantastic. I've gone through ABC, BitTornado and BitComet before jumping on the Azureus bandwagon, and none of those are nearly impressive as this. If you haven't tried utorrent, you ought to do it because you won't believe it until you see it. I sure didn't.

[Assassin]

how does it compare to BitTornado?

[LaZie]

I use BitLord i/expressions/face-icon-small-tongue.gif

[anphorus]

How easy is it to use? I've only ever used Bittornado and found it to be pretty user friendly (I basically just jumped right in, knowing nothing about Bittorent at all) but I've heard that some other clients are pretty difficult to use.

[Board of Command]

Originally posted by: Assassin
how does it compare to BitTornado?
I haven't used BitTornado since the beginning days of torrenting. Is it the same one that was once called something like "Shadow's Experimental Client"? If so, then I'd have to say utorrent has a superior interface. The speeds of all the clients should be similar as long as your computer isn't a piece of shit. For features I'd say they're about the same because utorrent doesn't have nearly as many options has Azureus, but it has all the ones you actually need and use. BitTornado and utorrent both would fall under the "simple" category in my opinion, but utorrent has proved very impressive so far.

[Kraco]

I don't know how much the JAVA based core of Azureus eats up memory (I haven't even ever used the program, only always heard people complain it's bloated), but it's good to keep in mind that the less the program reserves memory for disk cache, the more it strains the HD structurally (when you are downloading multiple items, like a whole series). Although for all I know, utorrent might manage this nicely dynamically, and in your case you just had few files downloading / uploading.

[aznroyale]

i use Bitspirit

[PSJ]

Originally posted by: LaZyKiD
I use BitLord

That program sucks up everything your comp is capable of, feels like a 56k when you download with BitLord.

Give us a link to this Utorrent, i want to try it.

[Phoenix20578]

Originally posted by: PSJ
Give us a link to this Utorrent, i want to try it.

Here (http://www.utorrent.com/download.php) I Tried this out. It works pretty well. It has a nice user interface and good configuration.

[Board of Command]

Originally posted by: Kraco
I don't know how much the JAVA based core of Azureus eats up memory (I haven't even ever used the program, only always heard people complain it's bloated), but it's good to keep in mind that the less the program reserves memory for disk cache, the more it strains the HD structurally (when you are downloading multiple items, like a whole series). Although for all I know, utorrent might manage this nicely dynamically, and in your case you just had few files downloading / uploading.
Azureus uses 150 - 200+ mb if you let it sit and download full speed for a while. It's pretty nuts.

By straining the hard drive, do you mean constantly writing and fragmenting the disk instead of caching large pieces and less fragmenting? If so, then utorrent allocates disk space very much like Azureus before downloading anything, so fragmentation isn't all that bad. Azureus uses a whole ton of memory because it functions through the "javaw.exe" thing from Sun's java platform. Azureus itself only uses about 10 mb, just like utorrent, but the javaw.exe thing is the one eating memory.

[Paulyboy]

Dude, this client is actually good, nice freaking find. I like it. I used to use Bitcomet and Bittorrent, but now I think I found a good one

[Kraco]

Originally posted by: BOARD_of_command
By straining the hard drive, do you mean constantly writing and fragmenting the disk instead of caching large pieces and less fragmenting? If so, then utorrent allocates disk space very much like Azureus before downloading anything, so fragmentation isn't all that bad.

I have to confess I'm no computer scientist, but it seems to me, logically, that if you are, for example, downloading two series: 26 episodes + 13 episodes, and just seeding 2 eps of another series, plus downloading the current Bleach episode, then it would make 42 files constantly accessed for hours. Because they are obviously located in different locations on the HD, it would mean the HD read/write head needs to move constantly between those files.

Now, the more RAM cache you allocate, the bigger chunks can be read from / written to each of those 42 files at a time. The HD can read / write 100 MB of data (theoretically) per second (single file read/write), so that's not a problem; the chunks in the cache can be quite huge before the HD would have problems handling their sizes. And the bigger they are, the fewer times per second the read/write head needs to move here and there per second.

I use BitComet (nowadays notorious), and you can actually check those numbers (HD read & write requests) in the program. And the dynamic size of the cache (dynamically within set limits).

Well, like I said, I'm no computer scientist, so most of what I said could be bs as well...

[ChaosK]

i use BitComet...it doesn't eat up away at my memory at all, or i have a lot, either way, does this new one allow faster downloads?

[Board of Command]

BitComet is the enemy of the BitTorrent community. It reports false upload rates to make your share ratio seem decent.

[Kraco]

I don't believe that (especially without reasonable references to somewhere else than to Azureus boards). Why I said it's notorious is only because of the DHT bug in the 0.60 version. That's why some sites (mainly hard core private pirate ones) have banned it. Not because of any false share ratios, as far as I have read at some forums.

I like BitComet a lot for various reasons, and I'm not gonna switch to anything inferior (in my opinion, of course), unless many anime trackers begin to ban it.

[Aramis]

My Azureus tends to crash without saying anything while i'm away of playing games or something. I'm always pissed off when I quit playing or come home just to see my downloads haven't progressed at all...

[masamuneehs]

Hm, utorrent is pretty damn awesome with not sucking up all the computer resources. and now that i've noticed the Scheduler option I really think I'll stick with it. The quickly updating info is good, and the user interface isn't that complex at all (i wouldnt call it the easy either). I'm changing over to utorrent.

The only thing i've found bad about utorrent is that "Pausing" torrents doesn't really seem to stop the DL or upload. In fact, i have no clue what the Pause function does in utorrent...

[Jadugar]

Originally posted by: Kraco
I like BitComet a lot for various reasons, and I'm not gonna switch to anything inferior (in my opinion, of course), unless many anime trackers begin to ban it.

Agreed.

I have been using it for a long time and I never had any problems with it. It does exactly what you want it to do. Thats good enough for me. It doesnt uses any of that java shit that Azureus uses which slows down your pc.
I would say utorrent is pretty much BitComet wrapped in a smaller box.

I am one of those guys who think that if nothing is broken then dont fix it so I will stick with BitComet for the momemt unless utorrent comes up with something revolutionary.

All the people who are using utorrent now I would like to know what were you using before?

[Darknodin]

I've been using uTorrent for a month now and its great... way quicker than anything else... one thing though : if you have Google Desktop installed (with Indexing), it'll create a sort of "conflict" which will cause the torrents to abort after 5 minutes. it is due to the way utorrent works in keeping the cache low and not using up ram. so by disabling this feature, you get rid of the problem. now... i still like this better than azureus because its small and has the scheduler option among other things... and as for using up ram, well, i have a lot of ram... but I guess i could have disabled the indexer from GD (i've heard simply removing the torrent folder from the indexing doesn't work)

[Xrlderek]

Originally posted by: masamuneehs
The only thing i've found bad about utorrent is that "Pausing" torrents doesn't really seem to stop the DL or upload. In fact, i have no clue what the Pause function does in utorrent...

Strange.. On my computer the pause function pauses it just fine. But it takes a little while before it's updated, it seems like the speed goes down slowly and then stops (it took up to two minutes).
I used BitTornado before, and Bitcomet, Bitspirit before that. Bitcomet started to crash alot, so I switched to Bitspirit, which after a while also started to crash alot. Then I switched to BitTornado, which worked fine, but used up quite some memory.. So I switched to uTorrent with no problems so far.

[Board of Command]

Originally posted by: masamuneehs
The only thing i've found bad about utorrent is that "Pausing" torrents doesn't really seem to stop the DL or upload. In fact, i have no clue what the Pause function does in utorrent...
I think that's a feature stolen from ABC. Pausing the torrent stops the DL and UL but stays connected to all peers. Stopping disconnects you from all peers. Strange how it doesn't work for you. It's not very useful anyways, if you need to pause a torrent, just use stop because it clears up system resources as well.