Bandwith Resource Management for Azureus and uTorrent
I’ve been having a bit of an issue with bandwidth management. Any time I’d decide to download something over my Bittorrent client anyone wanting to view my website would either have most of the images missing and issues with text placement or just find my site wouldn’t respond. Bittorrent like most of the filesharing clients on the web eat up a good deal of one’s available bandwidth by default. I’ve downloaded and tested quite a few different clients but the best ones I’ve found are Azureus and µTorrent. My basis for judgement is that both of the clients have, in their options, the ability to optimize bandwidth usage.
Most sites go on about how just limiting the upload speed will improve you bandwidth but another important tip is to limit the number of active connections allowed per torrent file. Most are set so some gargantuan number and will increase with the number of active torrents you have running. I cut back drastically on my bandwith by seeting the max number of connections per torrent to a small number like 10 or so and reduced the number of active torrents to 3. I’ve also limited my upload speed to about 20 kB/s and maintain the share ratio to 1 to 1, which I change if I feel the torrent needs to be seeded longer due to lack of supporting seeders. You can also change the upload rate on a per torrent basis but I’ve not played with this option since I don’t see a logical reason to do so. Both of these programs have a scheduler, Azureus uses a plugin, that lets you manage what times of the day you want it to run, which can be handy if you know when you’re network utilization goes up during the day.
Between the 2 clients I’d suggest using µTorrent if you’re running a windows platform. Azureus uses way more available resources both in memory and in cpu usage, probably due to it’s use of JVM, Java virtual machine.