I have been using BitTornado for over 2 years. I’ve been using since my “Dial-up SuprNova” days. But of late, I pissed off a little by BitTornado and at one point I couldn’t resist trying out µTorrent when they released 1.6 (stable) version.
I was testing the waters for troubles for over a week before venturing out in the ocean. Been good till now and there’s no looking back ever since. For all these 7 days I dint even think of using BitTornado.
What made me switch to µTorrent?
- One of the strongest reason why I switched is the BitTornado was not resource friendly (atleast better than Azureus) and added to that sometimes the process still runs even though I have closed the application. We’ll have to manually end the process. It takes only about 5 mb whereas BitTornado used to take 20-23mb or even more. That’s a high amount for my old PC.
- We can’t run multiple torrent in a single process. It’s ok to use BitTornado if we use only Private Trackers, but most of the times you’ll have full BW speeds if you run Public Tracker torrents. So incase you want to run more than 1 torrent, the more resource it’s gonna take.
- Another good reason which made me switch is whenever my connection disconnects or the power goes kaput or any other reason when BitTornado had to restart, then it “Check for existing data” and some data is lost, that is, if I happened to leech 100 MB previously, after checking it might show only 80 MB.
It was irritating when you have limited capped connection. Sometimes it checks even when you have paused the torrent before closing BitTornado.
- DHT Support. We can get more peers and logically faster speeds. But of course this feature will be irrelevant incase of Private Trackers
- Great for selective files upload/download. BitTornado has got problems with selective downloading, sometimes it’ll show error, in case it tries to download files that we wanted to skip. And partial upload is not possible (in older versions only and new versions got some bugs that needs to be fixed)
- Fancy features! I like to see more stats while leeching a copy. The one that I like is the Graph of the download/upload speed. The other feature that I like is that we can know what piece utorrent is downloading and also the total pieces (and the location) information.
- Visually appealing and Skinnable. It looks better than BitTornado. We can change the icon, toolbar graphic and status icon.
- Actively Developed and Improved. The bugs that appear are quickly addressed and fixed. The fact that this program is still new compared to other clients and they are improving.
There are problems too…
Using utorrent was also not a smooth ride altogether.
- Speeds are not fast enough. I can only leech around 90 MB in an hour. With BitTornado, I used to leech 95-100+ MB in an hour.
- Still I feel it’s not suitable for capped connections (like D1), so if you limit your upload speed, then your download speeds take the brunt. I cap my upload speed to 5 KBps (My max is only 6 KBps) and it limits my download speed to 30 KBps
- Even it take some time to get to the optimum speeds but anyway it’s getting better on this front.
- I think we can’t allocate particular BW for a particular torrent. That is if I have 3 torrents running and I want to allocate 60% of my BW to torrent 1 and rest shared between torrents 2 & 3.
We have the BW allocation option but that is crap. We can only set : ‘High’ , ‘Normal’ or ‘Low’. And 90% of the times, it doesn’t work for me. - µTorrent preallocated the disk space in our HDD, so people like me having less space on the HDD, it’s not good. If the file size is 900 MB and I have around 600 MB only in the HDD, then it’s a problem to leech as much as we want (or till we have space). It asks if we want to go ahead with the leeching, but still it’s bad for people like me.
- It hangs when I try to remove some torrents from list. It happens when I don’t “Stop” it. Even when I “Pause” the torrent and try to remove it, it hangs.
As you can see both the clients are not perfect. But weighting the options that I have and compromising a few for the greater good, I found µTorrent (just) better.
This post is dedicated to BitTornado which I bid a emotional adieu. BitTornado is a great client. I’ll recommend it to any newbies in the p2p world. But it’s time that I moved to bigger (and better) things. So long, BitTornado!
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22 comments ↓
utorrent community main aapka swagat hai,lol.
I have almost same old PC that u have,but as you mentioned “hang” is not happening with my PC with this 1.6 version.
Thanks for the “warm” welcome.
I want to know if my RSS feeds are working properly. I never use RSS, so I dunno abt them.
yup ur feeds are working properly, i also tried uTorrent once, but didnt like it, so switched back to Azureus
I shifted to utorrent too, after 1.6’s release. Its fast enogh for me, (almost equal to azure) but its overall waste data download goes a bit higher… It never hangs here but sometimes doesnt close properly… but I never close it
Well, abt the waste data (called as Redundant data) will be almost the same of all the clients save BitComet. That’s because you might have high connections to other PCs and you might be connected to more peers. And the data is almost negligible considering you run a p2p program on your BB connection.
The Freezing/Hanging/Closing problem do exists.
Another feature that I want to have is the IP Peer Ban feature. That’ll be good. I see ppl with 2m ADSL connection with BitComet and leeching without giving back.
And guys how is the site displayed? Is there any problems?
Azureus still rox.. IP ban, less data wastage, no freezing/hanging
and very less mem usage on my COMP
No man. Azureus uses JAVA. No way I can make it run with my P3 800MHz 128 MB RAM system. I forgot Azureus long time back.
Don’t get me started on the less data wastage now. As I have said earlier, Redundant data will be almost the same of all the clients save BitComet. That’s because you might have high connections to other PCs and you might be connected to more peers. And the data is almost negligible considering you run a p2p program on your BB connection.
Yeah Azureus takes up 60-70 (if like ~70 connections) Its a joke for 128 MB RAM. IP Ban, has it been scheduled for the next version? I am waiting for the Web UI, its cool to control your torrent from mobile
IP ban is automatic in Utorrent now. That is the person has to give us crap data and we get hash failed parts. Manual IP bans would be great! I’ll ban all the Dataone IPs and BitComet IP leeching without giving back.
Lol, then indian torrents will go bad?
^^
I don’t care. I don’t leech Hindi/Tamil movies much.
You should be getting the same or better dl speeds with uTorrent vs Az - simply because of the smaller footprint. You need to do some more tweaking
- especially check you’re not flooding your uploads. Try http://torrentfreak.com/torren.....-optimizer for a starter.
uTorrent client does NOT artifically limit your downloads in any way a la eMule if your limit your uploads. Most likely it is the other peers penalising you for lower uploads. Just download a second/third torrent at the same time
No individual BW settings per se. The BW Allocation setting is for UPLOADS only! Read the FAQ. You can set upper limits for each torrent though (which makes more sense since speed is variable) eg if you had 3 torrents with 1Mb dl BW total then you could set 60/30/10kbps Maximum DL Rates in the torrent’s properties. You can do the same for uls. You can also set priority for individual files within each torrent, which makes uTorrent focus more on asking for parts within those files.
Not quite sure what you mean with the preallocation. I think you want to set the files to sparse - the setting in advanced preferences: diskio.sparse_files - and turn off “Pre-allocate all files” under Downloads preference.
Cheers
Mark
Thanks Mark to clear some air in here.
I have some doubts:
1. Priorities and BW allocation:
I have tried that. It don’t seem to work. When I run two torrents and set highest priority to torrent 1 (and BW allocation into HIGH), speeds of torrent 2 might be more in case it got more (high uploading BW) peers.
Now, regarding the BW allocation, I was dumb enough not to notice that thing when ever I double click a torrent file in the main window. Now we have BW allocation for Download as well not upload alone as you mentioned.
2. Preallocation:
What I meant was.. utorrent allocates (or reserves) the entire file size even before I snatch the copy. That is is a file is 200mb, then it allocates (or reserves 200mb) in my HDD instead of “writing” into my HDD as and when it receives the particular pieces.
You know how that editing torrent names from the main window work? I tried it but it does not seem to change the name in my HDD folder.
IP ban, freezing issue, checking integrity when I don’t pause/stop the torrent and close the utorrent are the main issue on this client. Otherwise I’m pretty happy.
Thanks for pointing out some things. By the way, that URL doesn’t seem to work.
Another thing that I forgot to mention is the share ratios. I’ve been using this for past 7-10 days. My ratio is better than what it used to be. It manages and utilizes my full BW.
Even though my Uploads sucks (56k up line only compared to 256k down line), it gets the best out of my connection.
Hey Ashwin, u got an invite to BWT or DT? Thnx if u do and can send me one @ thagreatone1@gmail.com .
Another fella who made the switch from Bittornado to utorrent (micro torrent).
Well, I ve been doing the same thing. My main reason for the transfer was DHT support.
The one thing annoying is the pre allocation system, which was the original reason I switched Bittorrent to Bittornado. Well it has its pros and cons. But for a lad still loving his surviving 20GB HDD, this is something I had to give and take.
I still use bittornado on other older platforms.
Adieu and respects for Bittornado.
Ahh…seems we have a lot in common. Even I have a 20 GB HDD.
I still haven’t figured out the preallocation thing.
I came back here because recently my country’s main ISP DSL provider capped all p2p bandwitdths…
Well, I still cant figured out the pre allocated options, seems it doesn’t change a thing. My 20GB? Yeah, I am on it now, lol. At least it helps out by controllin my lust for games.
Recently Bittornado had an update but it wasn’t much… I still utilized utorrent for its auto ‘resume’ functions whenever the DSL gets down (DSL down? omg!) which i comboed-utilized with a small linksys router (auto-dialup-on-disconnect) functions.
I wonder if anyone knows what is like to have a DSL with a dial-up speed…
hehe I don’t know what happened to my previous comment, but you saw it and replied… just came across this page again, so FWIW I’ll give you my preferences which uses sparse files (ie, I don’t pre-allocate files).
Downloads: Pre-allocate all files = NOT ticked
Advanced: diskio.sparse_files = TRUE (you’re probably missing this!)
Also, IIRC the following must stay FALSE:
Advanced: bt.compact_allocation = FALSE.
and the following stays TRUE:
Advanced: diskio.use_partfile
The client wont change existing files, but new files should then be sparse. Eg on my seed box when I right click my torrent folder and click properties I get:
Size: 50GB
Size on disk: 35GB
…so I’ve ’saved’ 15GB in space by sparsing. Also I should point out sparse files only work on NTFS volumes.
Yep, you are limited to 30 KBps if upload is set to
…continued:
Yep, you are limited to 30 KBps if upload is set to
…nope, just didn’t like my left angled bracket
Yep, you are limited to 30 KBps if upload is set to under 6 KBps - maybe try a program like netlimiter to get around this?
I also miss the individual/manual IP banning (I changed from Azureus) so sometimes I’ll add an IP block with PeerGuardian2.
Finally re the priorities: I think the client does it’s best but can’t leech from others that aren’t uploading.
Yep, you find sometimes a low priority torrent is up/dling quicker than another, but I think it may be because of lack of seeders (and more so their speed) for that particular torrent - the client may as well download as fast as it can from other torrents if the one on high priority is already going as fast as it can.
If your bandwidth starts getting maxed out, then the client should take more notice of the priorities. I believe it is priority for uploads only though - can’t find where I read that though, but it seems true from observation. Of course other peers usually reward uploading, so usually the download speed will then increase. usually.
Hope that helps
Mark -
Thanks for all the tips and your comments. Maybe I’ll post a new article on how to configure our uTorrent!
There’s some problem with the comment thing. I don’t delete comments.
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