BitTorent Clients

We have talk much about BitTorrent and how it works.
Now is time to pick the right client in order to maximize the efficiency of BitTorrent. Therefore, can maximize the download speed with minimum memory usage. Some BitTorrent may eat up a lot of memory and may cause slow performance to our PC. Thus, choosing the BitTorrent client is a very important step. Moreover, the BitTorrent client should have the essential features needed by most users as so to make the users live much more easier.

There are a variety of BitTorrent Clients nowadays with most popular one. Below are the clients that i've used before base on my experience:

BitComet (www.bitcomet.com)
This is the first BitTorrent client that i've used for quite a time before utorrent. The interface is user friendly and the settings are easy to configure. Torrent are also saved in the folder torrent where the torrent file can be easily obtain if needed. BitComet is equipped with the essential features needed by most users. When user click on a specify torrent properties, the basic information are shown such as files, directory, and trackers. There is also an option that can set the rules to limit the upload speed for each torrent and the interface is easy-to-understand and maybe better than utorrent. However, the latest update has started to make the client goes worse as I use the 0.8 version. A lot of problems are encountered such as speed are very slow, error connecting to trackers, and much more. Therefore, the stable version would be 0.7.

uTorrent (www.utorrent.com)
This is the best Bitorrent client I would recommend for BitTorrent users and it is the client that I'm currently using. The performance of utorrent is the best of all. From the Windows task manager, I found out that the memory usage of utorrent is as high as 1X,XXXK only. Therefore, it would not slow down the computer performance and can continue to do other jobs such as playing other games while waiting for the utorrent to finish its downloads. In addition, I found out that download with utorrent the speed is much more faster and stable than bitcomet which means that it helps me to achieve the highest download speed. In my opinion, the interface of utorrent are still not that bad, but may still cause confusion for first time users. I was confused on changing the file download priority or sequence at the first time until I know have to click on the "#" button to re-order it. Again, utorrent also provide the essential features for the users, such as changing languages, creation of torrent, etc... I thing I like about utorrent is that it also shows the statistic of speed for upload and download. At the peers client, icon of country are also represented so we can know that most peers come from which country and the type of BitTorrent client are also shown with its version. Off course the peers download/upload rate are also shown too.

Azureus (http://azureus.sourceforge.net)
This is another one of the popular BitTorrent client around, which is made by java. To install it, Java JRE is needed which is quite troublesome. The good thing of this client is that it comes with a variety of plugins where it can add new features to the client. One of its useful features is that it can be control remotely(this feature requires to install additional plugins). If users are outside somewhere and would like to make the PC at home to download the torrent, this feature allow user to control Azureus through the Swing Web Interface or the HTML Web Interface. In other words, user can control Azureus remotely via browser. Azureus also have some other useful plugin such as auto-adjustment of the torrent upload and download speeds according to the network charge so to save more bandwidth for other torrents for example, speed can also be schedule according to how the user like and much more.

There are a lot more BitTorrent clients, the information about some other bittorent clients can be obtain from this web site: http://www.slyck.com/bt.php?page=2

In conclusion, I think that utorrent is the best because it perform its job efficiently with only consume a small amount of memory usage, and its process did not influence the PC performance. Most of all, the speed is high and stable which is what I concern the most. No one would like to download their files slow and steady, and that's why I choose utorrent!

I suppose most people use BitTorrent before, so please give comments on what you think about the BitTorrent clients. Thank you for reading~

Introduction of BitTorrent

Now, let start with the topic about BitTorrent. A simple introduction about BitTorrent. What is BitTorrent and how it actually works?

BitTorrent is a technology or a protocal that allow fast downloading and sharing of large files using the minimum internet bandwidth. Why is it using minimum internet bandwidth? Because users cooperate in the distribution of the file which means that user upload and download the file at the same time. As for the case of normal downloading such as FTP/HTTP download, the file is only transfer by the server, then if more users demand on downloading it may result in require more bandwidth. Therefore, bittorent is introduced.

Way that BitTorrent works

For bittorent to work, a tracker server and a seeder is needed. A tracker is a server that manages the BitTorrent file-transfer process and a seed/seeder is a user/computer with a complete copy of a file to be shared or distributed. As for the downloaders, which are known as leechers have to connect to the tracker in order to link with the seed. In BitTorrent, leechers will get higher download speed if they upload more. This is one of BitTorrent principal that solve the problem of leechers. Therefore, everyone with greater upload speed may speed up everyone download speed. Finally, to make better use of available Internet bandwidth (the pipeline for data transmission), BitTorrent downloads different pieces of the file the user want simultaneously from multiple computers.

This is the sample picture that shows about BitTorrent process:

In conclusion, I think that BitTorrent is very popular for sharing large files such as videos, games, etc. It is better than P2P because P2P software may have annoying advertisment, spyware and maybe the files would be very dangerous and easily affected by harmful viruses or trojans. BitTorrent is different because we may choose where to get the torrent file such as from trusted web site or forums and therefore will be save from harmful viruses, trojans and spywares. If the torrent file is shared from a forum, we may also get comments on the files by other users such as if there is virus in the file, users there will report to the moderator and they will get rid of it and give everyone warning about it as fast as possible. Therefore, comparing to other file sharing method such as P2P, BitTorrent is much more simpler, safer, faster and is the best of all file sharing methods.

That's all I can say about how BitTorrent works.

Internet References

BitTorrent.org » For Users [image, DOC, Online], 24 May 2007. URL: http://www.bittorrent.org/introduction.html
Carmen Carmack, Howstuffworks How BitTorrent Works[image, DOC, Online], 24 May 2007. URL: http://computer.howstuffworks.com/bittorrent.htm

BitTorrent

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