DebAWeek: deluge-torrent

I decided to see if I could find a better bittorrent client than azureus which has been my bittorrent client of choice for years. Most bittorrent clients are pretty basic but deluge-torrent seemed to be aware of the strengths of azureus with its numerous plugins and emulated that. The package comes bundled with numerous plugins, many of which had similar functionality to [[azureus] plugins. It also seemed that deluge-torrent despite being new to Ubuntu (in 7.10) was fairly mature and since it was written in Python instead of Java I hoped it would be much less resource intensive.

After installing the package I tried it out downloading iso files of the latest Ubuntu/Kubuntu releases. I was impressed with the download speeds I was seeing with deluge-torrent. I also liked that it supported protocol encryption which is a benefit for users whose ISP’s shape or block bittorrent traffic. I enabled the following plugins:

• Blocklist Importer
• Network Activity Graph
• Network Health Monitor
• Torrent Files
• Torrent Notification

That set of plugins gave me the functionality I had been used to from azureus. There is also a Simple RSS plugin which I might try out at some point. I ran some comparisons of memory usage between deluge-torrent and azureus and found that [azueus]] used 2 to 3 times as much memory as deluge-torrent. So I decided to make the switch and set deluge-torrent as my default bittorrent client in KDE and Firefox. Unless I encounter some problem or shortcoming that azureus doesn’t possess I will keep using deluge-torrent for my bittorrent needs.

For more about deluge-torrent:

• http://deluge-torrent.org/
• Deluge Torrent Client Aims to Thwart ISP Traffic Shaping