There are many many BitTorrent clients you can find on the Internet and µTorrent, BitComet, Azureus, BitTornado are the few popular ones. I strongly agree that Torrent technology is the best so far in terms of fair file sharing. For example, if a user is downloading at 30 KBps, they should upload at 30 KBps. However, due to the unique workload properties of many real-world swarms, this is not always enforced. So I glad that I found a new “selfish” bittorrent client that improves performance. I’ve joined a wrestling torrent site for a very long time now and a year ago, when there were 200 seeders, it would maxed out my download speed. Nowadays, even if there’s 400 seeders and less than 50 leechers, I am only getting 20-30kbps download. This new BitTorrent client will fix this problem!
BitTyrant is a selfish BitTorrent client that improves performance. It is fast, fair and familiar. During evaluation testing on more than 100 real BitTorrent swarms, BitTyrant provided an average 70% download performance increase when compared to the existing Azureus 2.5 implementation, with some downloads finishing more than three times as quickly. BitTyrant is designed to make efficient use of your scarce upload bandwidth, rewarding those users whose upload allocations are fair and only allocating excess capacity to other users. BitTyrant is based on modifications to Azureus 2.5, currently the most popular BitTorrent client.
BitTorrent differs from existing clients in its selection of which peers to unchoke and send rates to unchoked peers. Suppose your upload capacity is 50 KBps. If you’ve unchoked 5 peers, existing clients will send each peer 10 KBps, independent of the rate each is sending to you. In contrast, BitTyrant will rank all peers by their receive / sent ratios, preferentially unchoking those peers with high ratios. For example, a peer sending data to you at 20 KBps and receiving data from you at 10 KBps will have a ratio of 2, and would be unchoked before unchoking someone uploading at 10 KBps (ratio 1). Further, BitTyrant dynamically adjusts its send rate, giving more data to peers that can and do upload quickly and reducing send rates to others.
Here’s the test I ran. BitTyrant vs µTorrent.
I tried downloading VA-Ministry_Of_Sound-Kink_Vol_2-2CD-2006-FM torrent from filemp3.org using µTorrent. I let it run for 10 minutes, the download speed is around 5-7kbps.
I then tried downloading the same torrent from filemp3.org from the beginning using BitTyrant. Surprisingly, the download speed is around 12-15kbps! It never went down more than 10kbps.
Looks like the download speed has increased by 1 fold. Meaning if I am suppose to spend 4 hours to download a file using µTorrent, it’d only take 2 hours if I use BitTyrant. What a time saver!
So is BitTyrant really that selfish by not sharing anything? I personally don’t think so. BitTyrant can detect when additional upload contribution is unlikely to improve performance. If a client were truly selfish, it might opt to withhold excess capacity, reducing performance for other users that would have received it. However, the current BitTyrant implementation always contributes excess capacity, even when it might not improve performance. BitTyrant goal is to improve performance, not minimize upload contribution.
BitTyrant requires Java 1.5. If you’re having problems getting things started, try updating your JVM.
Important: For BitTyrant to be most effective, it is crucial that you accurately set your upload capacity during configuration. If you are unsure what your upload capacity is, try taking one of the speed tests available at DSL reports and using the value reported.
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