I needed to download a file on BitTorrent the other day, however I did not have enough free space on my iBook to do it, so I used my Ubuntu PC with Azureus. I had never used Azureus before, however I had used Eclipse, and if that was any indication, I figured that Azureus would be big and slow. My instincts were right. Azureus took about 10 seconds to start, gkrellm’s memory usage indicators passed from 10% to 40% and top reported a steady 20% load on the CPU.
At one point, I needed to see the progress of the download, so I went to Azureus and installed a remote access plugin. Pretty useful. Out of curiosity, I quickly checked what plugin writing for Azureus was like. Unsurprisingly, it seemed overly complicated and long — at least in comparaison to the quick functions one can write in Emacs Lisp.
Yet, in spite of its deficiencies, I can’t think of a better BitTorrent client than Azureus. It is multi-platform, it has more features than any other client (including encryption), it has a bunch of community-contirbuted plugins, it’s open source, it has a lot of developpers, it’s available in languages I have never heard about. Basically, it does everything you need plus a whole lot more you want and then some.
So even if Azureus is bulkier than the official BitTorrent client, slower than uTorrent, I think it remains the number one client.
