BitTorrent goes Micro
Last night I downloaded the most exciting piece of software that I’ve encountered all year. It’s called µTorrent, and it’s going to change the way you fileshare…
At a meager 130 KB, it’s obvious where µTorrent got it’s name (’µ’ or ‘Mu’ is the greek alphabet symbol for ‘micro’ in modern-day science) but the feature-set of this BitTorrent packet-pusher is anything but diminutive! µTorrent currently boasts trackerless support [Mainline DHT], RSS Auto-downloader, four-mode file prioritisation and an inbuilt speed scheduler - all the features and more that you would expect from a BitTorrent client and at a greatly reduced size and memory footprint.
I could go on for hours so to save us all some time, here’s a rundown on µTorrent’s performance next to that of Azureus (probably the most popular BitTorrent client at this time).
| Azureus 2.3.x | µTorrent 1.4 | |
|---|---|---|
| Size on Disk | 6.5 MB* | 130 KB |
| DHT Support | Yes | Yes |
| RSS Downloads | Yes | Yes |
| Speed Limiting | Yes | Yes |
| Speed Scheduling | No | Yes |
| Speed Graphing | No | Yes |
| Fast Resume | Yes | Yes |
| Open Source | Yes | No |
| Platforms | Windows/Linux/OSX | Windows |
| File Priorities | High/Normal/DND | High/Normal/Low/DND |
| Memory Usage | 40-80 MB | < 6 MB |
*Not including the 120 MB taken up by Java Runtime Environment which it requires to run
As you can see, µTorrent has a near identical feature-set to Azureus with greatly reduced system requirements. Although Azureus is Open Source and compatible with more operating systems, µTorrents remains the clear winner for a Windows user - particularly one such as myself who has somewhat less than bountiful memory to spare.
So what are you waiting for? Go Micro!
