An Introduction to BitTorrent clients
April 23rd, 2006 at 22:56 under Articles.What exactly is BitTorrent? If BitTorrent is an unknown concept to you, I highly suggest checking out Wikipedia’s article on exactly what BitTorrent is. If you don’t feel like reading that article, BitTorrent is essentially a protocol that is used for multiple computers to communicate with each other. Just like there is HTTP, SSH, FTP and IRC, BitTorrent is simply another way for computers to chat. Before there was BitTorrent, there was Napster and the many p2p clones that spawned from Shawn Fanning’s creation. Once those centralized p2p networks started to fail, BitTorrent was created to decentralize file sharing and ease the burden on file sharing servers. Now that we know the basic services that BitTorrent provides, let’s walk through the process of utilizing BitTorrent to download files and decide on the proper client for you.
Hardware and Software
Depending on which operating system you are running and the hardware that your computer is packing will partially decide which BitTorrent client you should or could use. Due to the fact that I run my computers on Windows XP, I will be focusing on XP compatible clients, however I still have a few links for non-XP readers. Different clients will require different resources to run, some require more memory, others will require more clock cycles, and some just won’t run at all depending on how old and limited your system is. Today I am writing this article from what I consider my Torrent/File server machine, an Athlon XP-2400+ coupled with 512MB of ram and a 300GB 7200 RPM hard drive. Torrents do not require the fastest processor or the most amount of ram, but the one thing that will at least ease the burden on your computer will be a 7200 RPM drive. Since torrents do not sequentially access data from your hard drive, if you have a slow drive, the slow access times could potentially bottleneck you, but then again this will only be a concern if you are running a very high speed connection. So the basics are preferably something that runs your favorite operating system and I’d suggest at least 512MB of ram along with a decent capacity 7200 RPM drive. If you don’t plan on running your client 24/7 and distributing files, any computer will suffice, my recommendations are simply to make the downloading and sharing process the best it can be.
Azureus is a cross platform BitTorrent client that utilizes Java. If your operating system is capable of running the Java Runtime Enviroment(JRE), then you can run Azureus. However, because Azureus runs on the JRE, it can be a resource hog but that is the price you pay for being cross platform. To start using Azureus, first you will need the JRE. You can get the most current JRE from Sun which can be found here. Once you have selected the proper JRE, you must download the Azureus Installer which can be found here. Once the download is complete, execute the installer and voila, Azureus is up and running. Including the typical JRE download, the total download came out to 14.7MB.
If Azureus is the Corvette of the BitTorrent world, uTorrent is the tiny Lotus. uTorrent offers many of the same features in a considerably smaller package which can lead to a much more pleasant downloading experience. The only downside to maintaining a smaller package is that uTorrent is not cross platform. uTorrent is Windows only, meaning if you run anything else, you are tough out of luck. Now when I say uTorrent is a tiny package, I am not joking. The currently version, 1.5, weighs in at 154.44KB. The download for this file can be found here, and on a fast connection will be faster than it takes for you to read this sentence. Once installed, uTorrent is up and running, a full features BitTorrent client.
Transmission does for OS X and Linux what uTorrent does for Windows. The current version of Transmission weighs in at 303KB and is a Universal Binary, meaning those of you running an Intel Mac will be able to utilize all the speed that Yonah can throw at you. Since I haven’t got a Mac or Linux distro running, I won’t be able to compare Transmission to Azureus and uTorrent, but I have been told it is a great client. If anyone has any comments on Transmission, do voice your opinion and I will try to compile them here. The installer for Transmission can be found here, choose between OS X, BeOS and Fedora Core 4.
The Comparison
While I could have included many more BitTorrent clients, from what I hear the two leading clients are Azureus and uTorrent, so I decided to stick to these two clients. For my comparison I chose a large file with a healthy number of seeds and peers and loaded up both clients and then downloaded the file four times, twice with each client. I tried to be as fair as possible in this comparison by configuring both clients to what I believed to be the best settings and then turning each one loose, separately, so that they wouldn’t compete for system resources. In performing the test twice, I hoped that the average results would show the differences between the clients.
While I don’t use Linux as an operating system, it proved to be the ideal test data to download. I was looking for a 1-5 GB file that had lots of traffic and the only thing that came to mind was a Linux distribution. All my other ideas were either illegal or too slow for me to endure, so I grabbed the healthiest distribution and started downloading. Starting out with uTorrent, I quickly made connections to the seeders and peers and my download rate quickly rose to 3.5 to 3.7 MB/sec stable, with spikes above 4MB/sec. This speed lasted for the entire duration of the test and I completed my first download of 3GB in 22:03 minutes.
I then fired up Azureus and started downloading the same torrent via the same tracker and I was surprised with the results. I fully expected Azureus to match uTorrents blazing 3.5+ MB/sec but Azureus ran slightly slower, averaging 3.0 to 3.2 MB/sec. However, compared to uTorrent, Azureus got up to full speed very quickly, within a minute it was doing 3 MB/sec, I don’t know if I can attribute this to the status of the torrent or the capabilities of the client, but either way, it got up to speed faster. In the end, Azureus completed the download in 24:49, almost 3 minutes longer than uTorrent.
Just to make sure neither of these tests were flukes, I ran both clients over again and the results were very similar. uTorrent downloaded the 3GB ISO in 23:28 and Azureus downloaded the file in 24:17. Now I don’t know if these times mean anything to you or not, but to me they don’t tell the whole story. All this proves is that uTorrent either lucked out both times or runs slightly more efficiently. Besides times though, I also monitored system resources to see if one client was more efficient than the other in this area.
On all four runs, I took screen shots of the client when it was well into the torrent and then after a few minutes of seeding and the results were stunning. When Azureus was downloading the torrent, on my system Azureus was utilizing on average 70-80% of the CPU cycles and somewhere in the neighborhood of 160MB of memory. When I was just running GAIM, Azureus, Task Manager, and XP, I barely had more than 40MB of memory left from my base 512MB. These results were crazy, I couldn’t imagine what this would do to a laptop if you were running off battery.
uTorrent is a completely different story compared to Azureus. When the client was running full throttle, it was consuming a measly 9MB of memory and on average 15-30% of the CPU cycles. When compared to Azureus, uTorrent comes out looking squeaky clean and the solution of the problem, but beneath these great results there was a problem. While the client was only eating 9MB of memory, the cache was eating the rest, once again leaving me with less than 40MB of memory out of 512MB. I believe this maybe partially due to my hard drive being a bottleneck even at 7200 RPM, or perhaps it is just part of the BitTorrent design, but either way, it caused my operating system to feel a little bit sluggish.
When you see my results, just remember that I was running a specific case. My hardware probably isn’t close to what you are running and I doubt you would be downloading such a large amount of data as I was, or at least from such an active torrent. However, in my case uTorrent seems like the definite choice for a simple BitTorrent client. uTorrent does everything you could ask from a BitTorrent client and it does it without breaking a sweat. Azureus still has its place in this world, besides being compatible with nearly every operating system, Azureus also supports plug-ins and has an extensive Wiki that can answer nearly any question you have. Either way, no matter which client you choose, I am sure you will be satisfied as both clients make it very easy to enjoy the benefits of BitTorrent and open up this large world of networks to the common user.
If you enjoyed this, please Digg me here!
Sidenote: On Monday I will be adding a quick guide and a slew of links for tweaking both uTorrent and Azureus, I simply ran out of time and I wanted this out the door by Sunday night. If you see any problems with the article, do let me know.
April 24th, 2006 at 2:48 pm
Hey thanks for putting this together!
April 24th, 2006 at 2:50 pm
Very cool article. You should install WP-Cache before the Digg Effect takes you down, man!
April 24th, 2006 at 2:51 pm
[…] The Comparison […] “Starting out with uTorrent, I quickly made connections to the seeders and peers and my download rate quickly rose to 3.5 to 3.7 mB/s stable, with spikes above 4mB/s. This speed lasted for the entire duration of the test and I completed my first download of 3GB in 22:03 minutes.” read more | digg story […]
April 24th, 2006 at 2:58 pm
I was just wondering what speed your internet connection is and what your settings where for each client because on my 2mb connection i can never get above 40 KB/s even on the healthiest of torrents.
Oh also great article.
April 24th, 2006 at 2:58 pm
The only comment I can make is that both tests should have been run simultaneously. Network conditions can very a lot in a matter of seconds, especially p2p networks. To get more accurate results you would have to run each test many more times and take the average. Otherwise running it once simultaneously would have sufficed. Other than that, good article.
April 24th, 2006 at 2:59 pm
I’ll have to check out that WP plug-in, I really wish I had more time to add the configuartion guide to this article but it looks like it hit frontpage faster than I expected, looks like I have more material for another article. Thanks for the suggestion
April 24th, 2006 at 2:59 pm
You could definitely use some more RAM in your computer. My goodness.
April 24th, 2006 at 3:02 pm
I would have ran both tests simultaneously but I was restricted by both processor and ram capacity. Currently my A64 is down and I didn’t feel like removing the gig of ram from it to put in this temporary machine. I normally run a gig of OCZ Plat Rev2, so I am really feeling the pinch of 512MB of PC2100. Perhaps when I have the A64 running again I’ll re-do these tests and do them simultaneously, I did both tests twice, alternating, in a hope to get decent results.
April 24th, 2006 at 3:05 pm
uTorrent runs fine under linux with the new version of wine. I ditched azureus a few weeks ago for uTorrent under wine, and it works great. Fast too. Seriously reccommend it. I compiled wine from source on ubuntu breezy, no real hiccups.
http://digg.com/software/µTorrent_works_with_WINE
April 24th, 2006 at 3:17 pm
Tom: Chris and I share a campus connection at Georgia Tech. Each dorm gets their own OC3 line. When he said 2mB/sec he meant 2 megabytes per second. I think you have him confused with megabits. I just did a quick speed test for ya.. However apparently this is slow, the kids with suites get 65kB/sec.
Bandwidth Test for Georgia Tech
April 24th, 2006 at 3:23 pm
Hey dude, that last image needs a closing tag. All the comments are a link to flickr because of it missing!
April 24th, 2006 at 3:23 pm
Shame you left out Transmission in the final verdict. It’s surely the prettiest.
April 24th, 2006 at 3:24 pm
[…] Its a show down between Azureus, U Torrent and Transmission. Who gets recomended and who go’s home, that and much more on show down!, But seriously this guy has done a nice comparison on three popular BT (not the sandwich) clients. If your new to this stuff, you should read it on your spare time. Take a looksy […]
April 24th, 2006 at 3:32 pm
Good job, honey.
What am I going to do when I’m in Thailand and have slower internet, if I have any, in my apartment? Georgia Tech has spoiled me. I suppose they atleast owe us fast internet as a compensation for what we deal with.
Love you.
April 24th, 2006 at 3:41 pm
You’d be able to make a stronger conclusion if you’d downloaded several seperate torrents, ideally simultaneously, over the course of several days… you didn’t conduct any tests to see if the differences you found between the clients were actually statistically significant, and regardless, you have limited validity in your experimental design.
For the record, I do prefer µTorrent.
April 24th, 2006 at 3:46 pm
nice work, also you can play tetris with utorrent. just hit t after you open the about window.
April 24th, 2006 at 3:53 pm
What about encryption? I know Azureus has the ability to encrypt its torrent traffic so that IP’s that are performing deep packet analysis won’t be able to see the traffic and throttle back the throughput.
Does anyone know if uTorrent offers the same thing?
April 24th, 2006 at 3:53 pm
Great comparision! I, too, have noticed that uTorrent is much better than Azureus. Download speeds are about the same for me, but Azureus runs a bit slower on my Toshiba Satellite M55-S325 laptop.
April 24th, 2006 at 4:09 pm
Typos -
first paragraph in “The Comparison” section, you wrote “I tried to be as far as possible…” It should be “fair as possible”.
third paragraph in “The Comparison” section, you wrote “However this time Azureus… either way it got up to speed faster.” What other time are you comparing to? This time is faster than what?
Edit: Corrected, thanks for reading through it, I have trouble reading my own material and picking out errors.
April 24th, 2006 at 4:15 pm
@Wayne
Yes µTorrent offers Azureus compatible encryption.
http://www.utorrent.com/faq.php#Does_.C2B5Torrent_support_Protocol_Encryption.3F
April 24th, 2006 at 4:21 pm
Nice comparison. i also a fan of torrent software. but current our telco is blocking torrent files downloading… headache …
April 24th, 2006 at 4:26 pm
Thanks for the comparison. I’ve also tried both and your article is an accurate reflection of my experiences too. One thing I would add is that uTorrent is not open-source whereas Azureus is. uTorrent may be a Lotus but for many people like myself, not being open-source is enough to swing my vote to Azureus. Just wish it used less resources…
April 24th, 2006 at 4:28 pm
“uTorrent does everything you could ask from a BitTorrent client and it does it without breaking a sweat”
Wrong. They don’t have a web interface yet. This is a very important feature for me as I often start downloads from remote machines. VNC is too much of a pain on my connection, not to mention my upstream is strained by torrents, so that doesn’t work. Oh, and I use Linux. Azureus it is.
April 24th, 2006 at 4:42 pm
KM, using the encryption built into Azureus or uTorrent either one should bypass your ISPs traffic shaping/blocking system.
April 24th, 2006 at 4:44 pm
Nice record meltrutnekition dude
April 24th, 2006 at 5:34 pm
Wow im surprised people weren’t aware of how much more efficient Utorrent really is… When I first heard about Utorrent a few months back, the performance issues were one of the biggest pluses. But still surprisingly most people seem to use Azerus.
April 24th, 2006 at 5:48 pm
1. given the neutral title of the blog, why are other places calling it “Awesome Azureus vs. uTorrent” or “Bit-Torrent client show down?” People need to take a break from the steady Fox News diet.
2. I use Az simply b/c it’s the only client I’ve found that does what I need to do in the cli mode. uTorrent doesn’t have a cli mode. I’ve talked with the Transmission devs and made a request but it is still too new to really compare to the other clients.
3. Like the author said uTorrent is small due to it’s closed, Windows-only nature. It still amazes me how people don’t value the freedom of foss.
4. Az is extensible through plugins. uTorrent has skins!
5. Not only is utorrent’s gui clearly copied from azureus, more than half the time when I go to the Az irc dev channel guess which client’s dev I find in there asking the Az devs questions up the yin yang. Utorrent owes a lot to Azureus.
April 24th, 2006 at 5:50 pm
I thought the comparison was a good idea but i wish you had tried to download more than one file possibly some smaller and some larger. It would also of been good if you had tested a few of the other torrent clients to see how they really compare to the big 2.
I personally have used both Azureus and uTorrent and I didnt like either of them, I use Shadows experimental version of BitTornado, its simple and although it doesnt look great it works quite well. I thought your test was a great idea and it would be great if someone decided to find all the clients and make a huge experiment.
April 24th, 2006 at 6:06 pm
I was a little suprised at the resource consumption of Azureus on your system. I’m running the Linux version of Azureus right now, and it’s taking just under 5Mb or memory, and almost no cpu usage (0% with a 1-4% spike every 3 secs or so(on a 2.8Ghz P4)).
Azureus is a platform independant application, so the only thing I can think of that was cause this difference, would be the Java runtime envoronment it’s running on mabye?
April 24th, 2006 at 6:17 pm
I will be performing more downloads, perhaps a file around 80MB and another file around 750MB since those are very common files sizes for various forms of media. Sometime this week I will try to do these tests along with another client or two. I will also be including a simple configuration guide with links to various other guides that I have found on the web.
April 24th, 2006 at 6:33 pm
post a link to the torrent you used so we can try it ourselves and see what ours comes out like
April 24th, 2006 at 6:42 pm
But can you have utorrent set to download the first and last part of the files and to give a high proitoy over high % done downloads? This is in Az but i dont know if its in utorrent
April 24th, 2006 at 6:57 pm
I’ve used Transmission for OS X. It is compact, but I don’t know about its relative speed; it seems comparable to Az. However, I was temporarily banned from a popular tracker using Transmission because it was accessing the server every 20 seconds while I was downloading multiple torrents.
April 24th, 2006 at 7:14 pm
I used to always use Azureus, but have switched to uTorrent have since I heard the benefits of it. It was an AWESOME thing I did as I noticed significant improvements in speed and CPU “hogness”. The interface is much better, and altghough it isn’t feature rich as Azu, it needs the basic of what most users want (plus it has DHT, so it is good).
April 24th, 2006 at 7:17 pm
An interesting read, as basic as it was (even basic experiments take a lot of setting up, so thank you for making an effort), basically found there was a varying diffrence between leech to seed turnaround time. What you set out for I think was achieved, to give a basic downloading profile of the clients from a high speed link- which you achieved.
A few criticisms:
Torrents are not all about downloading, there are important uploading aspects too. You mentioned that the Azureus client hogged a great deal of memory (aside from java), and attributed it to the caching features of it. The caching that Azureus does makes downloading faster for other people, at the penalty of memory for you.
There are an inherent number of performace degredating circumstances with torrents, basically because you are relying on other people (ie each has own set of unique circumstances.) I think more factors could be quantified (your connection up/down speed, latency to isp, min/max/stddev latency to other clients in the swarm, #seeds connected to, #leechers connected to)
I have recently finished a short stint in academia, so I’d like to see some more tests/evidence/results :/
I’ll continue to use Azureus becase it seemed to be a little slower, if anything in the tests- and I can only pull 150kb/s, not 4096kb/s :(
April 24th, 2006 at 7:29 pm
Although I’ve found uTorrent to be nice, I’m going to be sticking with Azureus for the time being. The SafePeer plugin for Azureus is just too nice to be without, and I find that Peer Guardian hogs my system resources to the point of being useless. I hate checking my downloads in the morning to find the Blue Screen of Death.
April 24th, 2006 at 8:49 pm
For me, uTorrent has had issues dealing with hard drive cache. I’ve run torrents across LAN’s that went so fast that uTorrent could not keep up with writing data to the hard drive. Azureus does not have this problem. I’ve tried this on several computers, all with pretty decent 7200 RPM drives.
April 24th, 2006 at 8:54 pm
[…] read more | digg story […]
April 24th, 2006 at 8:59 pm
Azureus can be tweaked so it put a similar load on your machine as uTorrent, you didn’t follow the directions. But uTorrent is requires less setup but with azureus I do this.
1.) Manage my torrents remotely via http
2.) Speed Scheduler
3.) email and text message notification upon start and completion
April 24th, 2006 at 11:44 pm
[…] So, if your still using azureus and you want to make the change over to uTorrent, go ahead and take a look at my Torrent Downloading for Dummies article read more | digg story Participate! Leave your comment. […]
April 25th, 2006 at 1:02 am
[…] Downloads, Rant, Geek Pr0n, Useful, Review, Tool, Torrents. | Add To Del.icio.us | Digg ThisTrack with co.mments | RelatedStuff […]
April 25th, 2006 at 1:56 am
uTorrent is not available under Linux.
So, no need to compare with Azureus….
April 25th, 2006 at 2:04 am
It will be great if you could include to compare more BitTorrent clients, such as BitComet. In addition, Linux versions of BitTorrent clients would be appreciated too.
April 25th, 2006 at 3:12 am
Wow! Thanks so much for taking time to do these tests. I’m looking forward to reading your setups on both clients! Sometimes, just a slight tweak in settings can make all the difference. The setups can get confusing if you are a newbie!
April 25th, 2006 at 5:54 am
[…] See this site here for a review of the Azureus, uTorrent and Transmission (mac only) bittorrent clients. As per my recent A-List, uTorrent comes out on top: When you see my results, just remember that I was running a specific case. My hardware probably isn’t close to what you are running and I doubt you would be downloading such a large amount of data as I was, or at least from such an active torrent. However, in my case uTorrent seems like the definite choice for a simple BitTorrent client. uTorrent does everything you could ask from a BitTorrent client and it does it without breaking a sweat. Azureus still has its place in this world, besides being compatible with nearly every operating system, Azureus also supports plug-ins and has an extensive Wiki that can answer nearly any question you have. Either way, no matter which client you choose, I am sure you will be satisfied as both clients make it very easy to enjoy the benefits of BitTorrent and open up this large world of networks to the common user. […]
April 25th, 2006 at 7:41 am
i have been using the original bitorrent client bram cohen and just recently i started to use utorrent. I have to agree with the test carried out that utorrent is much more effecient in making connections with peers. It is extremely lightweight and packed with features. Great work on the tests.
April 25th, 2006 at 10:49 am
[…] The Comparison […] “Starting out with uTorrent, I quickly made connections to the seeders and peers and my download rate quickly rose to 3.5 to 3.7 mB/s stable, with spikes above 4mB/s. This speed lasted for the entire duration of the test and I completed my first download of 3GB in 22:03 minutes.” read more | digg story Get small business ideas and earn extra income for your online business! Bookmark on del.icio.us […]
April 25th, 2006 at 11:00 am
[…] read more | digg story Share and Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. […]
April 25th, 2006 at 12:02 pm
Iv’e tried many different bittorent clients including utorrent & the original 1. My hardware is similar to the tester: Pentium 4 3Ghz, 512mb, 200Gb 7200rpm. I currently use Azureus now. I was surprised on your resources report on Azureus because iv’e never had Az use 15-30% of the computer cycles or even come close to using 160mb of memory. I currently have Az running right now with 2 seeding and the upload set to 44kb. And the cpu cycles conistently stays below 5%. Although i noticed it does always seem to use alot of memory it’s only at 112,300K. It seems like when u first start it up the memory starts off at double digits around 60,000K then continues to rise. but never much more than what it’s at now. I also think the safepeer plugin that u can add with Az is a life saver. Even though it makes Az take longer to load at startup. I think the security it provides is worth it. I cant use peer guardian because it’s not compatible with Mcafee firewalls. I sometimes play the Sims 2 and other games such as multiplayer online games while I have Az open and uploads going, i just set the upload speed to around 34kb when im playing online since 44kb is my max. I haven’t had any problems so far. I also like how u can change peer sources on individual torrents. Instead of having to disable dht completely u can just disable it for the torrents u want. Also Az lets u have some control over the encryption options. Instead of just turning it off or on like in utorrent. Az lets u choose plain or RC4 which uses more resources. It also lets u choose to allow just incoming non-encrypted connections. Or just non-encrypted outgoing connections. Which is good if u have a large file and u want to try and get more sources u can click just allow non-encrypted incoming connects and still have your outoing connections encrypted. For now im staying with Azureus it hasn’t given me any problems and i like all its options even if it does use alot of memory. =)
April 25th, 2006 at 12:18 pm
[…] An Introduction to BitTorrent clients at Gomeler.com (tags: bittorrent torrents azureus utorrent p2p) […]
April 25th, 2006 at 1:19 pm
Your hard drive is the bottleneck? Sweet Mercy!!!! How fast is your internet connection?
April 25th, 2006 at 7:01 pm
Great article. I tried to duplicate your test on my blog with a few tweaks (running the clients simultaneously, with more RAM, upload bandwidth limited to the same number, and using the same incoming port) and Azureus won by a longshot. I only ran the test once, but… any other ideas why my results were so different?
April 25th, 2006 at 7:43 pm
The only reason why I could imagine my results being so different from yours would be my connection and possibility the limited ram. Once my A64 system is rebuilt I will be doing these tests over to see what my results are with a better equipped machine. Since I left the connection unchoked, and my connection maxes around 4MB/sec down, 100KB/sec up, I think that might be the difference between your and my test results. I did use a linux iso for my test also which eliminated a lack of seeds, if my connection could handle more than 4MB/s I am sure my uTorrent results would have been even higher.
In regards to my disk being my bottleneck, that is a possibility because I was both reading and writing to the disk which was probably stressing the hard drive. I would only really be able to determine this by performing a series of hard drive tests involving read/write speed and burst/sustained traffic. Perhaps if I have time after finals I can see how much hardware limits torrent performance. Either way, I believe I am a rare case with over 4MB/sec of bandwidth.
April 26th, 2006 at 12:37 am
For all unix users
there is also a console based client, called CTORRENT. It has a nice command line interface and runs very nicely on all flawors of Unix and Linux.
Use it with screen , an you have got a torrent client you can administre from your office pc during work hours :)
April 26th, 2006 at 9:45 am
Your conclusions regarding resource usage may be incorrect. If both clients leave your system with 40mb of free RAM left then what could be happening is that Azerus is using the JVM to buffer its writes to the file system and uTorrent is using Window’s native file buffering / caching. In either case the memory used is the same, but only in the case of Azerus is the memory usage reflected against the program itself (since you are probably monitoring the JVM process).
This is just speculation on my part, but it is something to consider.
April 26th, 2006 at 11:33 am
In the end, both clients still maxed out my systems memory, it doesn’t matter where the cache was being stored, both programs ate healthy bites out of my system causing all other processes to be unbearably slow. I mainly attribute this due to the speed at which the torrent was being downloaded and the limited amount of memory to work with in the first place. Once I am done with finals I will be re-testing with more system memory and more processing power.
April 27th, 2006 at 10:47 am
[…] An Introduction to BitTorrent clients at Gomeler.com […]
April 30th, 2006 at 7:22 am
Thanks for putting the time into this, it was pretty helpful!
May 19th, 2006 at 9:38 pm
uTorrent will let you select what files to download within a torrent. This I find is very useful particularly if you already have half the files within a torrent.
June 1st, 2006 at 7:54 pm
[…] A month ago I performed a comparison between Azureus and uTorrent that tried to answer the question of which client is better. If you read it you would have noticed that I came to the conclusion that both clients were about equal with Azureus having more features while uTorrent consumed less resources. When I performed that test I only tested by downloading a 3GB Linux ISO with an older computer with only 512MB of ram. This time around I plan on testing 3 different files, and then running both programs simultaneously and separately. Hopefully this will be thorough enough to satisfy you, the reader, yet not be an information overload. […]
June 14th, 2006 at 1:32 pm
[…] http://gomeler.com/2006/04/23/an-introduction-to-bittorrent-clients/ […]
August 5th, 2006 at 5:11 pm
very nice review, i was actually searching for a torrenting client that doesn’t require JRSE2, it’s just… not worth it.
August 8th, 2006 at 7:22 pm
I really don’t think that the other users on here can judge their system against the test result of the tester. He has a much faster internet connection, and this is what used up so much memory in both of his clients. I have also had this problem when downloading, and uploading torrents at very high speeds, though still slower then Chris’s.
August 14th, 2006 at 10:59 am
For Linux (in particular Ubuntu :-) I recommend KTorrent.
It works much smother than azureus and uTorrent is a PAIN to setup with wine.
Cheers!
September 25th, 2006 at 7:34 pm
I have a Pentium 4 3Ghz, 1024 MB ram, 200GB. I´ve tried Bitcomet, Azureus and U torrent.
But my internet speed is kinda low and à dont know much about this hole mess :P
I now use Azureus cause it feels like it gets up to speed faster, but like I said my internet is kinda slow so it doesnt make much difference to me XD, but thx for making the test, it did open my eyes a bit!
My hard drive cache is low, I got the wrong one from the shop so that might explain why u torrent didnt work for me..
Again, thx for the test.
Mathew /sweden
September 25th, 2006 at 7:38 pm
Btw, the setups can get confusing if you are a newbie, and I´m a newbie so I´m looking forward to learn how to tweak it! :D
October 10th, 2006 at 7:39 am
I had and used Azureus, but gave it up, due to my 256 memory (having over 30 seeding tasks, with 10 active… its a killer).
But µtorrent rocks for me, and I use it to seed over 100 torrents… I got upload speeds of over 6 MB/s and download speeds, over 9 MB/s. In Azureus, that wouldnt have been possible for me.
December 4th, 2006 at 7:39 pm
In my personal opinion Azureus with its multiple plugins and options is way better, despite even its relatively big system demands. I’ve tested it on various configurations, concerning both PC specs and internet connections. Begining my adventure with Azureus in Poland with a radio internet connection 1Mb/0.25Mbps and Athlon 1200/512MB RAM/40GB 8MB cache/300W Modecom platform, and ending up in Great Britain with 22Mb/4Mbps cable 2-way LAN on average A64 with 1GB RAM, 2×320GB 16MB Cache in RAID 0 and 480W Tagan, I’ve never encountered such difficulties as written above. Its a fact, that Azureus can perform worse than expected when dealing with huge files (like over 10GB), but its a common problem for most if not all other clients as well. Its also true that it’s rather picky when it comes to system specifications, but I think it has more to do with Java, then Azureus itself. The thing about memory and processor consumption is rather questionable - I’ve never experienced memory absorption over 150MB and processor peaks above 20%, both on the older and the new gear ;) And I’m talking about really serious downloads/uploads (50GB of movies queued simultaneously :) The next thing is Azureus’ capability to connect over NAT LAN users :) Its pretty amazing seeing Azureus download speed at 170Mbps (both 100Mbit Lan cards at 70% usage full internet connection) :) Try to pull that using any other client. I’m planning to purchase 1Gbit LAN card just to have my system maxed out and see whether Azureus has any limits at all :) A word of conclusion: every aplication, especially as complex as Azureus, needs to be well configured and well managed in order to provide its user with all it really has to offer.
December 4th, 2006 at 7:58 pm
I forgot to write my specs and as everyone knows it has also alot to do with what I previously wrote. So here I go: first of all I use 2003 server instead of XP mainly due to its less memory-filling nature (The OS uses less RAM, as well as all aplications and processes). Secondly I made myself sure that my antivirus and firewall won’t interact with each other badly as well as with Azureus and Java platform, and that’s why I use NOD32 as an antivirus and outpost firewall :)
Cheers and sorry for my english.
December 19th, 2006 at 2:07 pm
3GB in 20 minutes?! Wow. Nice internet connection.
January 3rd, 2007 at 3:55 am
I believe there will always be die hard fans of Azureus. I use to be one of them. I now use utorrent just because it is simply better, faster, & user friendly. AZ just takes intirely too long to start up and uses too many resources. Plus JAVA really sux a$$. I’ve found numerous articles of the AZ vs utorrent comparisons on the internet and decided to check them out. By the time i got to this one i had already changed and expirienced utorrent enough to say that it wins by far. i am always a fan of simplicity and software that gets the job done faster. Thanks for the article i always enjoy reading this type of material.
January 29th, 2007 at 9:43 am
Great Article, however I´ve one question that I haven´t been able to find a concrete answer for:
I use Bit Torrent and my download speed is crippled by my upload speed, at testmy.net I get downloads of 350-450Kb/s but an upload of only 36Kb/s this means my download speeds on BitTorrent are pretty much limited to 36Kb/s (occasionaly I make 40 odd Kb/s) is this the same for all Torrent clients? if I install uTorrent or Magnet could I expect faster downloads closer to what I would normally expect for my bandwidth (4mb) or am I stuck with loads of download bandwidth that I can´t use for torrents?
February 3rd, 2007 at 11:59 pm
“File-sharing is often associated with illegal distribution of copyrighted content. But in recent months a number of networks have tried to shake off this old image.
BitTorrent, the company behind the original file-sharing software of the same name, has recently signed a number of deals with content providers, such as 20th Century Fox, in a bid to become a legitimate download service.
Earlier this year, Sharman Networks, the owners of Kazaa, did similar deals. Kazaa uses advertising to provide content for free.
No pricing structure for the BBC content on Zudeo has been revealed.
Azureus is expected to announce other partnerships in the New Year.”
Direct quote from BBC report posted Wed. 20 Dec, 2006 at:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6194929.stm
If you’ve had abuse notifications from your ISP…and wondered where the complaint info comes from…needless to say, I stopped using Utorrent.
February 24th, 2007 at 1:59 am
I HAVE BOTH AZUREUS AND UTORRENT - MY ADVICE IS IF YOU HAVE ANYTHING LESS THAN 1GIG OF RAM USE UTORRENT IT IS VERY LIGHT ON SYS RES WHEREAS AZUREUS IS RAM EATER EVEN ON A DUAL PEN IT IS MAKING MY WIN XP CRAWL…….
March 3rd, 2007 at 12:28 pm
I’m sorry but this whole measurements in this article are very unreliable and cannot be accurately reproduced. Download speeds especially with P2P are very random and you should know that. When you start Azureus for example and connect to the tracker you will get one set of seeds and peers. When you start utorrent and connect to the tracker you will receive another completely DIFFERENT set. So the p2p connections between the two programs are completely different and there’s no point to this page.
What is true is that utorrent uses less resources than Azureus and Azureus has many 3rd party pluggins that add great functionality.
March 13th, 2007 at 9:19 am
Thanks a bunch GREAT article, I just love to see Utorrent come out on top!!
March 28th, 2007 at 3:54 pm
For al those with direct connection try openning port in the prefrences section of utorrent.select port any if u have yeild on the bottom try double clicking the icon max out the bit to 100/mbits then tests the port if it is green select use this selecting may increase and downloads are quicker it works for me i use 1.8ghz and 512mb ddr400 ram and 7200 externel hd so i find this info somewhat usefull i have use both i have no prefrence.
March 30th, 2007 at 10:26 am
I don’t like Azureus. Like many others here it is making my XP into a snail. Will be changing soon… :)
BTW nice article !
May 14th, 2007 at 4:28 pm
Azureus is great if you have the ram for it otherwise stay away unless you don’t dl while you using the computer.
June 3rd, 2007 at 11:52 am
Update: I just recently messed with utorrent. Very very sleek. Little memory usage. I don’t like the new azureus look too much so I’m trying utorrent too.
June 7th, 2007 at 2:20 am
i dont like utorrent, it makes my browser slow while utorrent is up even if utorrent is downloading 3kb/s while my connection is 700+ kbps.
June 26th, 2007 at 11:35 pm
I personally like azureus the best. Azureus doesn’t give me any trouble performance wise.
October 9th, 2007 at 3:17 am
I’m sorry, but I think your test are deeply flawed.
First of all, you focused on the bandwidth of one torrent with your extremely high bandwidth connection. That, more than likely, is going to reveal a bottleneck in your system. Even if that doesn’t occur, it is more likely to reveal a single bottleneck in the implementation of the clients, which may also be related to a bottleneck in your system, for example your memory. Coupled with the limited number of samples, the conclusions you assert are fairly meaningless and may actually be wrong.
What you really want is a robust comparison that can tease out the differences in the client implementations. If you were to do another test, I’d consider:
- Using multiple torrents. That would be far more illustrative of what different client implementations bring to the table since issues such as prioritization come into play.
- Tests that vary the different peer types (centralized tracker, dht, etc.)
- Performance with encryption and other client-based security measures (increasingly important due to the growing use of packet-shaping technology by ISPs)
- Performance with torrents that see a lot of bad packets, i.e. torrents that have peers that are either intentionally or inadvertently sending bad information
- Tests with far more samples.
If I were you, I’d take some time to do some feature comparisons as well.
November 16th, 2007 at 4:27 am
hey i have a 256 Kbps speed of ADSL broadband…can i increase ma internet connection speed??i have Windows XP sp2 installed and i have utorrent 1.7.5 … my download speed is limited to 30-40 kbps… is there anything ? so i can increase my speed???
November 16th, 2007 at 6:18 am
angat, it sounds like you are maxing out your line. If you have a 256k-bit/s line then the maximum you can technically download is 256/8 = 32kilobytes/s. Since you land somewhere between 30 and 40 kilobytes per second it sounds like everything is working fine. If you want to go faster you’ll need a faster Internet connection.
January 7th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
micro torrent is the best
April 23rd, 2008 at 4:14 pm
The only reason you’d ever want to run anything except utorrent is if you aren’t using windows. I have tried them all, and utorrent is easily the most stable and uses far less system resources. I have a 20/20 connection (Verizon FIOS) and will flat out push it to the limit (upload and download) for days on end. I’ve run up to 50 torrents at one time, with my global connections set at 1000, and it just purred the whole time.
Additionally, I use the same server to stream video via TVersity to my kids xbox360, stream movies to my media center, and encode video with Microsoft’s media encoder. I can do any of these things at the same time utorrent is running hard in the background. About the only thing that will choke the system is if I burn a DVD while performing more than two of these things at once. Then again, my utorrent can be downloading 2.4mb/s (yes, it’s actually higher than Verizon advertises it at) at the same time I burn a DVD with no problems. There is absolutely no way any other client would let me get away with running all these things at once and still be stable for weeks on end. Trust me, I tried.
For the record, it’s not like I have some super computer. My server is simply an older AMD64 X2 running at 2.3ghz, and 1gb of ram with 1.5tb of space.
April 25th, 2008 at 5:33 pm
Interesting. Azureus has the option to run a web based Java Applet interface - great if you’re at work and decide you want your PC to start downloading something ready for when you in.
I have found on Linux Azureus doesn’t work with unofficial versions of Java, you need the one from Sun. Going to give uTorrent a try on my laptop, which I’m trying to keep bloat free.