My Bittorrent Switch
So for the past six months or so I’ve been using Azureus as my faithful Bittorrent client. Very nicely done program, good interface, lots of features. But, it is an amazing resource hog as it is a Java based application and can cause the Java runtime environment to reach nearly 200MB in memory usage. My machine has no problems handling the load, as it is a Dual Core CPU with 1GB RAM and RAID 0 SATA Drives, but this is just really more than I am willing to give up just for sharing some files. I’ve spent lots of time perfecting my Bittorrent configuration and have things working beautifully, but I finally decided to switch to a new client that is less resource intensive.
I did a lot of reading while looking for my new client, and finally came across the µTorrent client and decided it was worth the time to test it. µTorrent is under very heavy development with new versions coming out close to weekly, which is a bit of a pain, but the upgrades so far have been painless. The program is tiny, with the current version weighing in at somewhere just under 100K. Memory usage is a great improvement as well, with µTorrent currently only using 4.6MB of memory on my system. Some people might think the interface and options are too simplistic, but truthfully I like it that way. I don’t want a billion features, and all the main stuff is there in this program. It allows me to run the 30-50 torrents I seed and any new stuff I download and I haven’t noticed any issues in the past week compared to my use of Azureus. Mostly I help seed the latest version of several Linux distros as well as things like Diggnation, TWiT, and The Scene.
The next major version of µTorrent is supposed to have DHT (trackerless) support, which will make this program completely rounded and good enough for my needs totally, so unless something horrible happens with this program I’ll probably be sticking with it for some time to come. Don’t quote me on this though, I’m always looking for new and better programs, so if someone has something they think I really should try, please do let me know.