The neverending search for a replacement for Azureus

[dangel]

Some of you know i really don't like azureus, purely from the POV of believing a download client ought not to eat memory at an expotential rate It's a problem of JAVA in general.

In any case, I seem to have found it's antithesis - a fast, stable and more importantly _tiny_ client called uTorrent. I've been trialling various alternative clients for a while and i'm pretty impressed with this one - perhaps it's worth a try?

http://www.utorrent.com/

You don't need to install it and, for it's size, there's a heck of a lot of features packed in there. It also seems to manage the connection better than BitComet and even includes a natty scheduling bit

[specofdust]

Was there not a thread on clients the other day? Maybe it was one of my other forums, I always get confused.

Anyhow, Azureus sucks imo, but Bit Tornado does me nicely, and ABC's pretty good too.

[unreal]

Alright thanks for that Dangel, I'm going to be giving this a try

[dangel]

Was there not a thread on clients the other day? Maybe it was one of my other forums, I always get confused.

Anyhow, Azureus sucks imo, but Bit Tornado does me nicely, and ABC's pretty good too.

There was - and it got a bit messy as someone took the fact that i didn't like the bloatedness of azureus the wrong way. I'd like to keep this thread about alternatives if possible, rather than provoking (another) debate on the merits/problems with Azureus. To be clear - this is about looking for an alternative for those of us that feel the bloated (and otherwise very good) Azureus isn't quite what we'd want. uTorrent wasn't mentioned the other day so i thought it worth while posting this up to see what others feel about it.

A few things missing right now:

- blocklist support. IMHO i've never been that convinced about blocklists but apparently this will be in fairly soon.
- DHT support - again, there's a debate on this one too but i think it has to go in.

I'm getting as-fast-as speeds with uTorrent (wasn't with BitComet tbh after testing it over the w/e) as Azureus and am, so far, very happy with it. Bitcomet also seemd to kill my connection - e.g. limit u/l rate to 24k in azureus or utorrent and you can still surf without too much impact, in Bitcomet it needed to be 20k..

[specofdust]

Sure thing

Blocklists can be essential. One time when I was downloading a torrent, which was about 1Gb, I ended up having to download over 2Gb because one seed kept sending me..crap, basicly. Being able to block people who send bad data is a very handy feature.

Whats DHT support though?

[dangel]

Distributed Hash Table - basically means clients have an 'internal network' outside of the tracker which can be useful if the tracker goes down

Blocklists - i meant in terms of a list of IP addresses that are flagged as evil commerical people. Bad data can still be filtered through banning a client after he's sent you x amount of rubbish.

[specofdust]

Ah ok, most of the groups I belong to have blocklists anyway, so not a huge deal personally. But DHT sounds like a good idea, why would people be against it?

[dangel]

Ah ok, most of the groups I belong to have blocklists anyway, so not a huge deal personally. But DHT sounds like a good idea, why would people be against it?

Privacy implications i guess. I've no objection to it - it's a very good idea when a tracker goes down

[unreal]

I found BitComet to be the absolute boobs of torrents, I love the thing. Azureus can suck my foot tbh now, its more demanding than my ex girlfriend

[spiral out]

I have tried a few of the others including bit comet and azureus, but have been using bit tornado for ages now and have found it to be the best.

[dangel]

I found BitComet to be the absolute boobs of torrents, I love the thing. Azureus can suck my foot tbh now, its more demanding than my ex girlfriend

I quite liked BitComet bar it's mishandling of bandwidth (having to set ul rate lower than every other client to get decent browsing speed) and queues (watching it try and up 15 torrents at the same time!).

[Davey W]

/me casts resurrect

Tried utorrent last night, very slow compared to Azureus. Trying bitcomet now and instantly I'm seeing a better speed.

Five hours of download and utorrent had only got about 20mb of a 35mb file. Started bitcomet about 10 minutes ago and already I've got 5mb of it.

[dangel]

New version 1.1.4 out:

Changes from µTorrent 1.1.3 to µTorrent 1.1.4 :

- Fix: Switch to vurlix's icon
- Fix: Changed default port to 32459
- Fix: Decrease about box sound volume to 50%
- Fix: Center several dialogs on the screen.
- Fix: Set the connect-to-tracker-on-exit timeout to 10 seconds instead of 60
- Fix: Show 100% for zero byte files.
- Fix: Missing OleInitialize from directory browser.
- Fix: Some missing translations.
- Feature: Superseed.
- Feature: Send no_peer_id=1 to tracker.
- Fix: Rename button in create torrent dialog to Cancel/Close depending on state.
- Fix: Replaced 'Create and start sharing' with a checkbox and fixed so it actually works.
- Feature: Don't play the sound unless you click on the uTorrent icon in the about box.
- Feature: Store peers in resume file.
- Fix: Resolve Peer Ips option is now instant.
- Feature: Don't include forced jobs in seed queue computations.
- Fix: Flags field in the UI sometimes said U incorrectly.
- Feature: Ban clients that result in too many hashfails.
- Feature: If you are adding a new torrent, check if the data has already been downloaded to the completed folder.
- Fix: Crash when adding torrent for some languages.
- Feature: Added logger window.
- Fix: Use system's default character set when creating font objects. Fixes some strings not displaying correctly in translations
- Fix: Use the system's window text color in the general detail tab
- Fix: any/all in seed priority were reversed.
- Change: Use WsaEventSelect() instead of select(). (Should get rid of Select() error)
- Fix: Fix crash bug for some tracker replies
- Change: Show scrape info only on the generals tab. Show internal list info in the list.
- Feature: Load announce-list.
- Feature: Added relevance column in peer view, shows how interesting the peer is.
- Feature: Don't allow connect to self.
- Fix: Be somewhat smarter when detecting if a torrent has already been downloaded to a location.
- Fix: Move completed torrents didn't work right, torrents would get lost on restart.
- Change: Unchoker will behave as if it's seeding when nothing is being downloaded.
- Feature: Submit utorrent version number in crashdumps.
- Feature: The %-done counter now doesn't include skipped pieces.
- Feature: Include version number in HTTP requests.
- Fix: File associate function didn't cleanup properly from BitComet.
- Feature: Show blocks that have been downloaded but not yet written to disk in a different color.
- Feature: Include incomplete pieces in the resume state.
- Fix: Produce better error dumps.
- Fix: Window wasn't maximized on startup.
- Feature: Auto load torrents from a specified directory.
- Change: Redesigned generals tab.
- Feature: Added option to limit # of connections for computers with unpatched SP2.
- Feature: Connect to tracker again if we don't have enough peers in the internal list.
- Fix: Seeder priority now works right if you've skipped some pieces.
- Feature: If there is no default download folder, remember the last chosen folder when asking where to save torrents.
- Feature: Added option to log peer traffic.
- Change: Switch to Determination's status icons.

Just a few bits then..

To see what people think/post your feeeelings: http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?t=659

[dangel]

/me casts resurrect

Tried utorrent last night, very slow compared to Azureus. Trying bitcomet now and instantly I'm seeing a better speed.

Five hours of download and utorrent had only got about 20mb of a 35mb file. Started bitcomet about 10 minutes ago and already I've got 5mb of it.

To be fair, I find it faster than bitcomet but without the 'choking' effect BitComet had on my connection. Azureus is better in terms of features (and hence speed) but not by enough to make me worry (i'm maxing my connection with uTorrent) when my pc isn't becoming a swap-o-rama The new version has super seeding which should help too.. As I said, the biggest problem i had with bitcomet was it's lack of coherent queueing, which wasn't acceptable for mass downloading/seeding _for me_.
I often feel that benchmarking them is very difficult, simply due to the way in which the protocol works. I have great faith in uTorrents developer as he seems to have come out of nowhere with such a well-functioning client even at this very early stage.
Whatever you use - be happy

[Rabs]

To solve the blocklist problem with any client other than azureus (which has internal but slow support with the safepeer plugin) - simply (download, install etc) run Peerguardian before starting your Bittorrent client.

The safepeer plugin from Azureus uses the same blocklist it just takes forever to parse, whereas with Peerguardian - its very quick to load, update and isn't a memory hog.

I personally use Bitcomet with Peerguardian due to DHT and the inbuilt -getpeers- functions (google it) - which adds more seeders and leechers than the tracker displays.

[dangel]

Yeah i'm using Peerguardian 2 now with mine... It's much better than the original which used to hog memory and cpu!