by LANjackal » Sun Oct 09, 2005 1:12 am
Decent attempt at a new client. It's also portable, which is great because you can run it from removable media on any PC. In addition, it shows more details about your peers than most other clients do: their country of origin and the domain name they're on. Not very useful info to most users, but interesting nonetheless.
On the other hand, it's SLOW compared to BitComet by a factor of at least 2 (on the torrent that I tested it on). And yes the test was as fair as I could possibly make it. I started the torrent in uTorrent, ran it for a while, then stopped it. I then immediately started the same torrent in BitComet with the file saved to a different location (so that BitComet would be forced to start the download from scratch). Uploading also seems to be a problem.
Additionally, uTorrent doesn't explicitly support the Bittorrent DHT tracker (which BitComet does, Azureus uses it's own unofficial DHT implentation if I remember well).
I think the above speed shortcomings are probably due to uTorrent's UPnP implementation coupled with the lack of DHT support.
Conclusion: if you REALLY need the system resources, uTorrent might your ticket. However, if you have resources to spare, choose BitComet every time. Unless you really want a LOT of control over your torrents in terms of options, or you run a non-Windows OS, don't even consider Azureus. Bittorrent is very CPU intenisve by its very nature - your PC has to maintain connections to many other peers simultaneously while constantly downloading from a suitable subset of those, uploading to a suitable subset of those, checking for errors and checking what parts of the file the other peers have. Coding all that in notoriously slow (but interoperable) Java was never a good idea in terms of program execution speed. Even Limewire drops the ball in the performance department on that one - it's GUI is slow.
BitComet's still the reigning champion, folks, but we're happy to have other players on the field.