Hacker News Reader

Comment by ruggeri | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I do not trust any BitTorrent software. I wasn't being careful at installation and was shocked to find uTorrent changed my default search engine and added a bunch of bookmarks. I wasn't even aware it was developed by BitTorrent.

On the positive side: Transmission works great!

View on HN

It wasn't. They bought it out several years ago. You can still find the last original version on the net somewhere - it's surprisingly good and has aged really well. In fact, I get better performance out of it than out of Deluge or Transmission.

Edit: here you are. you can still run it without instaing even: http://www.filehorse.com/download-utorrent/7858/

Of course Deluge, written in python can not compare to uTorrent's tightly optimized C++ code. Transmission is better, but its back-end (libTransmission) is not as well optimized as libtorrent-rasterbar. Any C++ client based on rasterbar such as qBittorrent should offer similar performance to uTorrent.

If you don't require streaming, older uTorrect clients are still your best option. If you do, it IS possible to install the recent version of uTorrect without any external adware and to disable all of the banner ads.[1]

[1] http://forum.utorrent.com/topic/81421-321-how-to-turn-off-ad...

The performance of bittorrent has almost nothing to do with the performance of the language the client is written in. Its not an io-bound task. Performance in bittorrent comes from selecting the right chunks at the right time from the right peers. I think utorrent uses its own algorithm whereas both deluge and transmission use libtorrent's built in algorithm (which is configurable, but only to an extent).

Transmission and deluge often max out my bandwidth though, so its not like they're poor performers.

Deluge and Transmission do NOT use the same libtorrent back-end. Also, you may be right about Deluge not being CPU bound on your i7 based desktop, but I can tell you from first hand experience that both Deluge and the Java based Vuze were maxing out my Atom based home server. Switching to the C++ based qBittorrent, resolved the issue.

aria2c on command line. Fastest download application ever for everything including bittorrent and including metalinks.

I'd just be a little bit afraid of security issues no? There have been a couple of uTorrent vulnerabilities in the past.

http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list.php?vendor_id=6...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com