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Lustaf

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 27, 2006
14
0
I'm just wondering if there's any clients that work for Mac so I can start some P2P file sharing.
 
I use Transmission, mainly just for its speed & low resource needs. It never goes above 15% processor on my G4-800.
 
pinto32 said:
I use Transmission, mainly just for its speed & low resource needs. It never goes above 15% processor on my G4-800.
Same here.

The 'official' BitTorrent client for Mac always used too much CPU for my taste. :)
 
Count me in as the first vote against Transmission.

It's great for lightweight torrenting (one or two torrents and lots of apathy. seriously.), but anything beyond that and Mainline/Transmission/TomatoTorrent go out the window. Bits on Wheels is sorta good if you're a PPC user, otherwise it uses just as much resources and isn't as powerful as the Azureus unibin.

One caveat: some sites ban a lot of the Mac clients because they don't follow the protocol correctly (cough Transmission, BoW) or is just too obscure (Tomato Torrent), so check it out before you start using a new client.

For guaranteed compatibility and tons of features, go Azureus.

Otherwise...

Note: I'm totally biased, as I bittorrent all the damn time and can't stand the utterly pathetic features in every single client outside of Azureus when it comes to banning peers that send bad data, having complex seeding rules instead of simply ratio/time based rules, actual queues, global and per-torrent upload/download speed regulation, manual announces...

Azureus is the only one that really works properly with multiple torrents when it comes to connectability (read: NONE of the other Mac clients will have connectable torrents if you start opening torrents halfway into your session, even though the ones you opened at the beginning are connectable, hence requiring a restart every time I open a new torrent to make it connectable?!? Hell no, I don't think so.), and best of all, is the only one that actually only connects to peers from the tracker and nobody else if you want it to.

In addition you can force hash checks anytime you want, which surprisingly enough some clients can't do even though they can all fast-resume (no hash checking) torrents in their own way. The best some of them can do is hash check automatically after finishing a download, which obviously leads to corrupted files, misreported statistics, getting banned from peers because you downloaded and then proceeded to upload a file that got corrupted and stuff like that.
 
Based on many of the benefits janey cited, I use and recommend Azureus. It may not be as light as other apps, but it is powerful, meets all of my torrenting needs and runs just fine without being a resource hog on my 1.25 GHZ G4 iMac with 1 GB RAM. :cool:
 
I use Azerus but I don't really like it tbh. It crashes practicly every time I quit it.
 
Acquisition now has support for downloading Bit-Torrent files. I have used it a couple of times and it has worked flawlessly.

It is just an all round good P2P program, and that is why i bought it.
 
Sweetfeld28 said:
Acquisition now has support for downloading Bit-Torrent files. I have used it a couple of times and it has worked flawlessly.

It is just an all round good P2P program, and that is why i bought it.

I also use Acquisition. It's not free, but it does its job very well.
 
milkdev said:
I also use Acquisition. It's not free, but it does its job very well.


It might not be free now, but when i started using it, it was. Dosen't the download button on the site still let you download the trial nagware version?

I could be wrong, its been a while since i bought the program.
 
I've been using Tomato Torrent for the occasional download, and as long as you only have one or two torrents going it's excellent... but once you try using it for 10-20 it really slows down my system (iBook G4@800MHz, 640MB RAM), using 100% CPU constantly... :eek:

Based on recommendations in this thread I tried Transmission, and now my whole machine is responsive again. Transmission is happily using ~15% and even with AirTunes running my CPU averages ~50% and I can start and use other apps without any (noticeable) slowdown... :)

Thanks! Transmission rules... :)
 
Melkor said:
I use Azerus but I don't really like it tbh. It crashes practicly every time I quit it.

You might want to try reinstalling it, or ensuring you have the latest version. As I said, I'm running it on my 1.25 GHz G4 iMac with 1 GB of RAM and have never had any issues whatsoever with it.
 
Mitthrawnuruodo said:
...Thanks! Transmit rules... :)
You mean Transmission, right? Transmit is an FTP client :p

And i'm not too much of a fan of acquisition, paying for a p2p app? lol. i'll donate, but never pay or use nagware.

Personally, I'd like a uTorrent port (guys...if you're any good with c++ and mac development...please go talk to ludde in #utorrent about helping porting it to osx :p ). Transmission is like the halfassed-and-missing-most-of-the-features Mac sister of uTorrent, and it's a shame, because I want something more than pretty, I want something functional and I'm not willing to give up functionality for some pretty app.
 
Here is another vote for Azereus.

I have tried using Transmission and Tomato Torrent, but they don't seem to work as well as Azereus. It is also my favourite for my PC desktop as well.

I would like to see a port for u torrent for mac, because of all of the good things I have heard, but until then, Azereus will continue to be my favourite.
 
janey said:
On Windows, use uTorrent. Can't be beat, smaller and better than Azureus :)

I was planning to switch to utorrent from Azereus, but I don't download torrents on my desktop anymore, as I made the much more important switch to Mac. :p
 
azureus

I mist admit - I p2p on BitTorrent quite a lot (i've been uploading for the last 3weeks on full upload bandwidth :) ). I have a Dual 2GHz G5 with 2.5GB of ram - it has always run sweet.

The only delay I have is when it deletes the 7-8GB of filespace if i decide to scrap the download. Other than that, it runs very very well. I agree with what so many ppl say on these forums - run over a GB of RAM on Tiger.

FireArse
 
FireArse said:
The only delay I have is when it deletes the 7-8GB of filespace if i decide to scrap the download. Other than that, it runs very very well. I agree with what so many ppl say on these forums - run over a GB of RAM on Tiger.
I think you can turn off file allocation in Azureus if you really need the 7-8gb before the torrent finishes downloading. Beware though, once I was downloading more stuff than I had space for, and things started to go wacky until I got enough free space on the drive.
 
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