I've been getting into Bittorrent as a worthwhile means of egalitarian file distribution lately (and no, with Bittorrent, it's not all about illegal sharing--see http://www.redvsblue.com/ for an example). However, I'm not entirely sure it's working as well as it should for me.
First of all, are there any decent clients other than the standard one (from http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/)? I like that on account of its simplicity, but it freezes occasionally, doesn't provide a lot of control and handles non-latin filenames very badly. Azureus, a Java client, has controlls out the wazoo but is very hard to get working and seems even slower. I also tried eetee, but I couldn't even get that to work, and MLMac doesn't seem to support Bittorrent at all, though MLDonkey theoretically does.
I'm also having two issues:
1) Slow Speed. Occasionally, I'll get a torrent that will run at ~20K/s down and maybe 15K/s up, but most of the time I get wildly fluctuating nubers under 5K/s. I'm on a 3Mbit cable with fairly high-speed upload, these are torrents with two or three dozen peers, and I can see other people on the same download (using Azureus) that are getting speeds literally hundreds of times higher, so something seems to be wrong.
I do have a set of ports in the 6881+ range open (if I don't do that, it works REALLY slowly), and I also tried turning OSX's firewall off entirely (no router), so I'm a bit stumped.
Is there something I'm missing here? Should I be doing anything else, or is that just the state of affairs on the Mac?
2) I ran into some nasty problems with a file that had Japanese encoded characters in the name of an enclosing folder. I eventually got Azureus to start a very slow download of it, but the standard client wouldn't let me rename the output file, and refused to create the directory. Anybody know any ways around this?
Maybe I'm the only Mac user on earth who messes with Bittorrent, but hopefully there are some more knowledgeable people here...
First of all, are there any decent clients other than the standard one (from http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/)? I like that on account of its simplicity, but it freezes occasionally, doesn't provide a lot of control and handles non-latin filenames very badly. Azureus, a Java client, has controlls out the wazoo but is very hard to get working and seems even slower. I also tried eetee, but I couldn't even get that to work, and MLMac doesn't seem to support Bittorrent at all, though MLDonkey theoretically does.
I'm also having two issues:
1) Slow Speed. Occasionally, I'll get a torrent that will run at ~20K/s down and maybe 15K/s up, but most of the time I get wildly fluctuating nubers under 5K/s. I'm on a 3Mbit cable with fairly high-speed upload, these are torrents with two or three dozen peers, and I can see other people on the same download (using Azureus) that are getting speeds literally hundreds of times higher, so something seems to be wrong.
I do have a set of ports in the 6881+ range open (if I don't do that, it works REALLY slowly), and I also tried turning OSX's firewall off entirely (no router), so I'm a bit stumped.
Is there something I'm missing here? Should I be doing anything else, or is that just the state of affairs on the Mac?
2) I ran into some nasty problems with a file that had Japanese encoded characters in the name of an enclosing folder. I eventually got Azureus to start a very slow download of it, but the standard client wouldn't let me rename the output file, and refused to create the directory. Anybody know any ways around this?
Maybe I'm the only Mac user on earth who messes with Bittorrent, but hopefully there are some more knowledgeable people here...
