Giving Up on KTorrent.

[swestrup]

I just upgraded my KTorrent from the KDE3 to the KDE4 version, and I can't get it to work. Well, I can, but I can't seem to get it to recognize any of the 250+ torrents in my queue. Of course, KTorrent doesn't have any documentation, so the only thing that it looks like I can do is scan my .torrents cache (over 1000 torrents) and then manually delete 3/4 of them as I determine that I've already downloaded that content. Bleah.

So, if I have to do THAT much work, I might as well switch clients. I've been getting mighty tired of KTorrent crashing all the time and its horrible queue support anyway. So, what linux-based torrent client do folks think I should move to?

Things I am looking for are:

1. Linux platform support.
   
2. Runs as a Daemon on a server.
   
3. Efficiency. No Java/python/perl implementations please.
4. Multi-user support.
   
5. Priortiy Queues of some sort.
6. Partial Download support.
7. Encryption
   
8. Client that integrates well with firefox.

So far, the candidates would appear to be:

1. Transmission
2. BTG
3. Deluge
4. MLDonkey

I'm not sure there aren't better candidates out there though, and I don't really have much experience with these. I've tried out MLDonkey in the past and got it working, so at least I have some experience there, but I've never tried out its bittorrent features, so I don't know how useable they are. Transmission is the best known of the list (and so hopefully will get new features faster), but I wasn't impressed with the small amount of use I've given it.

Otherwise, I have no idea which way to go. Any suggestions?

Comments

[azrhey.livejournal.com]

we use transmission at home but right now only on the macs so I. Ouldnt tell you how well they work on UX. What I like is that although they are installed on the macs their "web interface" thingie works well that I can see what's going ok and download a torrent in my Si rows machme and remotely make it work not sure how t works but I like it. We finished downloading all 202G of dr who two days ago it took months and didn't crash once... Not sure about the advanced surf you are talking about maybe you should ask Pierre

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

I like Transmission just fine, although it doesn't have all the features mentioned. I'm not sure it does daemon mode, but it does have a minimal web UI, but it seems to only take a single username/password (optionslly, no auth by default). I'm not sure what is meant by "priority queues", there's some features to pause/unpause torrents depending of a few things, but I don't use it, as we might have had a top of three or four torrents at once. Not sure what is meant by partial downloads either, but it should be okay.

It does encryption, but I don't really know what it buys you (sure doesn't defeat Bell's throttling, but that's okay, MLPPP does). I'm not sure what is a "good Firefox integration", but I click on torrent links and stuff happens. I do like that it can work out the port forwarding on my router by itself.

A Python or Perl implementation would surely be fine, as long as it uses a good native code hash library (both have mmap modules, aren't huge memory pigs if programmed properly and would otherwise be entirely I/O bound anyway).

[swestrup]

Well, by 'priority queues' I really meant good queue management, with the ability to say when to do a download. On Ktorrent it always enqueues torrents at the end and it takes hundreds of clicks to say 'do this once my current download finishes. Ideally I would prefer a high-priority queue for downloads less than 4 gigs and a low-priority queue for downloads that are more.

'Partial Downloads' is what they call the feature where you can download only some of the files in a torrent. I was surprised that there are clients out there that don't support this.

'click on torrent links and stuff happens' is what I meant by good firefox integration. Again, some of the clients I looked at didn't do that very well.

Python or Perl implementations can be efficient, sure, but my experience is that folks who choose them as their main programming language aren't used to thinking in terms of efficiency.

[azrhey.livejournal.com]

I does partial : I told it not to download Ecclestone and Tennant on my all of dr who as I already had it. Not sure about auto prioritizing something but you can set to high normal or low priority manually . Resume doenlaod works just fine.

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

The queue management is not really good. I know it has some features to pause transfers on a certain number of conditions (no more than N downloads ongoing, no more than N seedings ongoing, when a transfer is stalled for more than N minutes), but I don't know if it restarts them. Like I said, I rarely have more than a few torrents at once, so I just keep them all going, all the time.

It does partial downloads, yes, as azrhey was saying. It also allows you to prioritize folders or files within torrents, so that some files will be fetched first (but it still fetches others, so that it doesn't deadlock).

[swestrup]

Thanks. I might take another look at Transmission. Right now I'm trying out Deluge and while its got a daemon mode it seems like it might as well not have. Also, while its queue management is more functional that ktorrent's, its not actually that easy to use. Also, it has some bugs which mainly show up when migrating to it from other clients...

[kallisti.livejournal.com]

I am having good success with Transmission, which I switched to from KTorrent. K sucked once you had a lot of torrents running. I used to use Azure, which is now called Vuze...it's really good, and does everything you can think of, plus some...but as it is a JAVA app, it sucks up memory and CPU like there's no tomorrow.

ttyl

[swestrup]

Yeah, I looked at Vuze, but my server is an old machine and so I don't want it to be using up all its CPU just doing downloads.