Calling torrent experts...

[Speedo]

I've never really bothered with torrents before now, but have been playing with them for the last couple of days... not overly impressed.

I'm just using the plain BitTorrent client, version 4.22.4 btw.

1. Downloads are extremely slow.. even when they seem to have a reasonable number of seeds, I don't think I've seen a consistent download faster than 20 KB/s, most much slower than that.

2. The client is a massive resource hog. It holds one of my cores at 100% usage, and swallows memory like a fat kid on a candy store shopping spree. This morning after leaving it running overnight, it was holding almost 1.4 GB in use.

3. It shuts down my entire internet. I tested just a minute ago to be sure I wasn't just imagining it. I had a normal download, running at around 900 KB/s (pretty typical, 7Mb connection), then fired up BitTorrent. The download slowed... and slowed, until it was barely maintaining 5 KB/s... even though at that point BT was only showing a total download rate of about 30 KB/s.

So, is this just a sucky client, or the nature of the beast?

 

[Mulholland]

My buddy uses a program called U-torrent. From what Ive seen it's not bad. It barley causes a blip on the CPU, uses little RAM and downloads at 150 KBP/s. Plus it seems to have a nice search engine loaded into it. It will hog your bandwith if you give it the chance though.

 

[vbraun]

I reccomend trying Azureus.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

Okay. it is mostly just the nature of the beast. Most torrents connect accross a range of ip's so they can eat up your connection pretty easily. Second is, some clients are just inefficient. My favorite ones are BitCOmet, and Azureus, both have a nice GUI, and are easy to use. The problem with speeds you're getting mostly depeneds on the torrent, the older it is the least likely it is that there are any seeds on it, or in some cases that there is anyone on it. This results in slower speeds and sometimes the torrent not finishing. Another thing could be that the ports your program is using to dl arent open. Look around in the preferences and find out which ones you have to open.

Some tips you can use are;
Dont stream any music or anything while downloading, this will GREATLY slow down your torrents and your streaming w/e

If you can, set the max upload speed to 3kb/s. This will ensure that you are still doing the fair share rule ( not just leeching, but actually giving back too) while making sure that you dont get your bandwidth eaten up by uploads. If anything as soon as you finish downloading you can remove the limitation and seed at max speed

Lastly is: find a good torrent. find one's that are recent and have lots of seeds. This almost guarantees that you will have faster speeds. On bitcomet for instance you can open two different torrents of the same files and it will just merge the trackers, giving you more seeds.

I would give you some good torrent site's but i dont want to risk moderator wrath

 

[Speedo]

I will try Azureus... can you transfer partially complete dls from one client to another (guessing no)?

I would give you some good torrent site's but i dont want to risk moderator wrath

PM

 

[Genocidicbunny]

No you cant sincei think most clients use proprietary partial formats. I know BitComet uses .bc format which i dont think any other client does. So you're probably out of luck. And im not sure that you want to try azureus since it does run on java and i have noticed it can have a memory leak sometimes. But whatever, its your computer.

 

[nonconformist]

I will try Azureus... can you transfer partially complete dls from one client to another (guessing no)?



PM

You should also set a fairly high "outgoing" cap, as the more you end out, the more comes your way.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

technically that doesnt really work unless the tracker or your client uses this method. This is why I usually cap my upload speed at farily low and then when i finish downloading I remove the cap and let it upload for however long it took to download.

 

[Grisu]

I use Azureus, I think the torrent network is superior to all other p2p-systems when it comes to stuff that's widely spread. I usually get the best speed with torrent. as opposed to the emule-network.

it does tend to really slow my internet connection too, though.

 

[Chairman Meow]

You're probably on a connection that has a low upload limit, and if you reach your limit, your download speed slows to a crawl... I'd suggest setting a low upload cap while downloading, and then increasing it when the download is done so that others can download from you.

 

[Speedo]

Switched to Azureus, so far it's much better behaved and performing. With 6 active torrents it's maintaining 150 kB/s+ total download speeds, using about 85 MB of RAM and < 5% CPU.

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that the BitTorrent client sucks

 

[croxis]

utorrent (u being the letter mu) is also another torrent i suggest you try if you are looking for an even smaller footprint

 

[Grisu]

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that the BitTorrent client sucks

I always thought the official BitTorrent client to be little more than just a prove of concept. never intended for actual use