BitTorrent 3 years later

Can you still remember a time when BitTorrent was just a simple download dialog with a few extra information about download/upload and seeds/peers and nothing else? When Azureus and the like were just mere imagination?

I remember my first meeting with BitTorrent. I was just an innocent guy looking for some new chapters of Naruto manga in ToriyamaWorld.com (back then, Naruto was practically unknown yet and its Anime counterpart is still non-existent). Behold, one day they started trial for a new distrubution method called BitTorrent made by a guy called Bram Cohen. They said it would help relieve some of the traffic from their file servers. Being the nice guy I was, I downloaded the client and tried it out. Performance was terrible at first, since only a few people tried it out. Back then, the concept of a bigger swarm giving out better download speeds was totally lost on most of the people. The forums abounded with complaints on the speed. They wanted their direct-download http links back.

Fast-forward a year or so. More people have embraced the practically new technology. New clients with additional functionality have surfaced. Now you can queue multiple torrents. You can limit your download/upload speeds. Blah Blah Blah. About this time, I have switched as well to a visual client called Personal Torrent Collector (PTC). It wasn't the most full-featured client then and it still isn't. What I liked about it was its simplicity. It is now sadly a dead project.

I have since used a lot of different clients.
1) Azureus which is probably the most famous one. I never really liked it. Too many features maybe. And it seemed like a resource hog.

2) BitComet - Currently in controversy. It first catched my attention when I saw that it was written in C++. At the time, most clients were either in Java or Python. True-to-form, it had a faster performance because of its C++ internals. Currently taboo with some private trackers due to some DHT issues. DHT was a new feature added in vesion 4 of the BitTorrent protocol which enabled trackerless torrents and peer-searching.

3) ABC - one of the more popular clients around. I liked it when I found out it didn't pre-allocate files on the hard-disk. So even if you are downloading a 1 gigabyte file, only what you have downloaded is used in the hard disk.

4) μTorrent - my latest find and latest love. It's a full featured client with a clean and easy-to-use and simple interface. Its written in C++ as well so it's responds quicker compared to Java or Python clients. And all of that for a mere 130Kb executable. Yep, you saw correctly thats in Kilobytes. You don't even have to install anything. My current memory usage for it is a mere 2320K. Compare that to some of the resource hogging clients out there.

BitTorrent is here to stay even with all the complaints from RIAA and MPAA. It is merely a tool used for distribution of files. The author didn't set out to create a tool for pirating licensed files but for efficient distribution. What it's users do with it can't be the fault of the author.