Favorite bittorrent client?

[Solus]

I use uTorrent and it works ok, but some downloads are just too slow. What bittorrent client do you use and why?

I'm sure something out there is better than what I'm using now.

[Rat]

Azureus, because I tried it and it works. Aside from the original BitTorrent client, I've never tried any other, because I've never needed to.

[thrombus29]

Second vote for Azureus, only downside is you have to have Java installed, and some people don't like that.

I have heard good things about Bit Lord also.

[BenK]

I like uTorrent, I tried Azereus and it was a resource hog.

[Solus]

No one knows of anything much better than uTorrent though?

I hate when there is only one seed for a file I really want and the person is barely online. Just stay online for 1 day, leave your computer on!

That's what got me to thinking I need a better as in faster client.

[Pipirr]

Used to use the in-built client in the Opera browser, but now I use Flashget (http://www.flashget.com/index_en.htm). Its a download manager (for ftp, html and bittorrent) and is approximately a million times faster.

[Solus]

Used to use the in-built client in the Opera browser, but now I use Flashget (http://www.flashget.com/index_en.htm). Its a download manager (for ftp, html and bittorrent) and is approximately a million times faster.

Thanks for the recommendation. I will try it and report my results.

[Soapy Sam]

What is bittorrent?
Anything I ever download is ftp or standard TCP/IP WEB whatever it's called.
A brief explanation please?

[PogoPedant]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent

The first animated diagram is quite helpful in understanding.

The quick and dirty:

Every file is divided into parts. These parts are shared in a so-called torrent. You ask the various people participating in the torrent for parts that you lack and they send you those parts. You also share the parts you've already gotten with the torrent. This way, you can start sharing long before you get the file/s you're after and you can get the file you're after independently of who is online, so long as at least one person is online that has parts you lack.

[TobiasTheViking]

rtorrent

[Solus]

What is bittorrent?
Anything I ever download is ftp or standard TCP/IP WEB whatever it's called.
A brief explanation please?

Those two covered it mostly. You can use a bittorrent client to get almost any piece of software or multimedia.

[BenK]

No one knows of anything much better than uTorrent though?

I hate when there is only one seed for a file I really want and the person is barely online. Just stay online for 1 day, leave your computer on!

That's what got me to thinking I need a better as in faster client.

Sounds more like the tracker is your problem, what sites are you using?

[PixyMisa]

I used Azureus until it went insane one day and I had to shoot it. :(

It works again now, but I've switched to uTorrent. It has most of the same features and uses a lot less in the way of CPU and memory.

Speed-wise, though, they're much the same.

[El Greco]

uTorrent because as others have said is light on the system. Speed shouldn't depend on the client. If there are only a couple of seeders who have set an upload limit there's nothing you can do to increase speed. Also make sure you have not set an upload limit yourself in uTorrent, that should restrict download speed too. If it's absolutely necessary to set an upload limit use Net Limiter.

[Bikewer]

I use the original Bit Torrent client; it works. Download speed seems entirely the result of the number of seeders; the more the merrier. At present, I'm getting nearly 100kbs on a 3-gig download, with over 100 seeders.

I was getting a lot of slowdown when trying to surf while running Bittorrent, but I ran the "optimization" software from PC Pitstop, and now my internet speed seems unaffected by any downloads.

[Ian Osborne]

On a Mac - Tomato Torrent for most things. If I need to download a specific file or files from a torrent without taking the rest of it, I use Azureus, which is a resource hog, but is the only Mac client I've found which does this.

[NeilC]

uTorrent appears to be as good as it gets as far as BT clients go. It works better than Azureus ever did for me.

For some trackers I use allowing UPNP results in a significant increase in speed.

[Reno]

I used azureus until I tried uTorrent. uTorrent is much lighter and isn't as quirky as azureus which used to fail on me periodically.

using uTorrent, I get up to 480kbps, but I have 4meg cable broadband connection and the speed is dependant on that, the number of seeders, and the seeders upload speed. Also, don't try to download more than 2 torrents at one time, better still, just download one at a time. That way you'll have all your bandwidth for that file.

[JonWhite]

Does anyone know how BitLord compares? :boggled:

[Reno]

I've seen Bitlord being recommended a lot, especially on torrentspy. I thought about trying it out, but as I have no problems with uTorrent, I don't really see the point. Why fix something that works perfectly well?

[Ryokan]

Speed shouldn't depend on the client.

I just wanted to repeat this, because it's very true. Under the hood, all torrent clients are alike. The best client is the one you prefer.

Personally, I like Azureus.

Problem with μTorrent, though, is that it isn't open source like all the other clients, so if there's spyware or anything like it in there, we wouldn't know. I doubt it, though.

[Ryokan]

I've seen Bitlord being recommended a lot, especially on torrentspy. I thought about trying it out, but as I have no problems with uTorrent, I don't really see the point. Why fix something that works perfectly well?

BitLord is okay for open torrent sites like Torrentspy, but the client is banned from all closed sites as there's a problem with it reporting the correct ratio.

[Reno]

I get much of my 'stuff' from DC++ anyway.

[Blight]

BitLord is just a modified version of BitComet.

BitComet is ok, but recent versions seem a bit slower and actually have less features than uTorrent (recent versions actually seem to have scaled down some important features such as bandwidth allocation).

uTorrent is probably the best client out there. You can configure some aspects of it to make it faster by better matching your network setup.

What can seriously slow down things in everything "BitTorrent" is uploading too closely to your network limit (due to the asynchronious nature of most internet connections).

[Solus]

Seems most here prefer uTorrent as well. I was just checking though to see if I had missed something and there was something better available. My record for download speed was something like 300 kB/s+ on a torrent that had thousands of seeds. Took about 5 minutes to get a 250 MB file, not bad.

I'd love to learn how to attract a seed though. The file I want has one seeder but the peers that get connected are ones that have only 10% of the file; I have 85% of it. Connect to me you bastard! I wish I could send a message on uTorrent.

[JonWhite]

BitLord is okay for open torrent sites like Torrentspy, but the client is banned from all closed sites as there's a problem with it reporting the correct ratio.

Open or closed sites? A little explanation please. :confused:

[Blight]

jonwhite:
Some sites require that you register and upload content to maintain a certain ratio (up/down ratio). some just let you download willy-nilly.

The private sites tend to be faster, but the upload limit can be problematic if your internet upload speed is limited.

Solus:
There is no way to connect to the seeder manually, otherwise everyone will just connect to seeders and the download will actually slow down. Under some conditions the seeder may never accept a connection and will only connect itself to the peers to send them the data (so it could distribute the load the best way it thinks it can).

As for fatest speed... I got 650k/sec on a 5mbit line (basically the maximum you can get). There are a lot of factors involved, if i had two downloads at once, I only got about 500k combined (too many open connections can actually slow down your connection). Other times I may only get 20-30k, in which case, I have 2-3 torrents downloading at once without slowing each other. Basically, the faster each torrent is, the less torrents you want active at the same time.

[JonWhite]

Thanks Blight :)

[The_Fire]

Tried bitlord, but that one kept hogging my connection BIG time, so I switched to Utorrent. Now the only time I get connection problems is when I run a High priority torrent with high bandwidth allocation.

Not that I torrent much. For some reason I don't really like the idea of other people getting access to my computer, even if it IS download only.

[Rawkarma]

uTorrent is my preferred torrent client.

I mostly use XDCC. If you're extremely lazy and don't find the prospect of searching or waiting in IRC channel for lists, you can use a download manager for XDCC bots like XDCC Catcher.

It costs 10 euros for the Pro version. Considering the amount of files on offer (mine currently searches over 400 networks), and the substantial amount of time it strips from searching manually for what you what -- it's well worth it.

It's as simple as firing it up and searching the packets it's found for you. The only thing that you need do from here is cue your downloads and leave it running. Go do some work, go for a walk, write a sonnet or just go to bed.

I normally prefer to set mine at night as it's always nice to wake up to a chit load of downloads and with little to no fuss throughout the entire process.

[Solus]

uTorrent is my preferred torrent client.

I mostly use XDCC. If you're extremely lazy and don't find the prospect of searching or waiting in IRC channel for lists, you can use a download manager for XDCC bots like XDCC Catcher.

It costs 10 euros for the Pro version. Considering the amount of files on offer (mine currently searches over 400 networks), and the substantial amount of time it strips from searching manually for what you what -- it's well worth it.

It's as simple as firing it up and searching the packets it's found for you. The only thing that you need do from here is cue your downloads and leave it running. Go do some work, go for a walk, write a sonnet or just go to bed.

I normally prefer to set mine at night as it's always nice to wake up to a chit load of downloads and with little to no fuss throughout the entire process.

Interesting to note, thanks for the mention.

[schplurg]

Another vote for uTorrent. Less of a resource hog than any others I've tried.

[Prospero]

uTorrent is probably the "best" torrent client for most PC users. It's a very lightweight app that's incredibly powerful. It plays nice with trackers and is very egalitarian.

Azureus is a resource hog, but has a lot more features than uTorrent. The benefit of having those plugins is debatable in most cases. It's good for blocking RIAA/MPAA trackers and BitComet/Lord/Clone/Thief clients, but that's really only pertinent to members of private communities. It's open source, which is also a very nice perk.

Mainline (the BitTorrent client) is run by BitTorrent Inc. which has signed a deal with the music/movie industry, which makes the client incredibly untrustworthy imho. It doesn't help that Bram Cohen, the inventor of the BitTorrent protocol, has a very poor concept of how his technology operates in the real world.

I should mention that shortly after BT Inc inked their deal with the movie/music industries, they bought out uTorrent. Future releases of the client as assumed to be compromised. MainLine and uTorrent are both closed source, so there's no checking to see if new version are reporting information back to the trackers that they shouldn't be.

I use uTorrent with the auto-update disabled.

[Blight]

prospero:
uTorrent 1.61 seems ok, even though it was released after BT purchased it.

I doubt uTorrent would go evil, purchased BitTorrent content is using windows media DRM which calls home the moment you try to play it and that should enough for them.

As for knowing if it calls home, opensource has nothing to do with it, all you need is packet sniffers and there are A LOT of well informed people using uTorrent, so if they did something "funny", it would become well known pretty quickly.

[strathmeyer]

rtorrent is a great command line bittorrent client.

[Psi Baba]

I like uTorrent. And like Prospero, I keep the auto-update turned off and am content to stay with v. 1.6, although Blight is probably right about 1.6.1 being uncontaminated. But I'd be wary about upgrading beyond that. As far as functionality, uTorrent works great and has never caused me a problem. I let it run while I'm working and it has no noticeable effect on system resources. I used the ABC client once just to get a DL that was not DHT-safe which isn't permitted by the tracker site I was using (but the torrent had been posted before the policy change and was still available). I wouldn't like ABC as a regular client as it's a bit clunky.