Comments on: Transmission vs uTorrent [Mac Only]

By: Lawrence

Lawrence — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 08:32:52 +0000

Having tested both extensively, I can report that each client favours peers using their own software. This is astounding but I can verify this 100% on my mac!

The same torrent file on uTorrent shows a list of peers with approx 70% using uTorrent, while Transmission’s peers for the same torrent shows peers mostly using Transmission.

If this observation is correct across the board, and since uTorrent is massive in the PC sector, you could get a wider pool of uTorrent peers from which to choose. This may have an impact on the average download rate of the swarm.

By: Callum

Callum — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 00:44:29 +0000

haha you cant compare anything on linux to mac
especially when its ran through an emulator

By: Kovac

Kovac — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 05:06:17 +0000

First of all, a rant. Bad, bad Johnny Boy. Don’t be so stingy, so greedy. Seed. Forever. Not everything, mind you – when I don’t like a file, I don’t want other people to be disappointed with it as well. But my favourites, oh boy – I got one at 30 ratio, and counting. I will only stop seeding when I delete the file itself.

Now, to business.

Even though everyone else is already saying it, I feel the need to repeat it once again. And I hate to admit that something originally meant for Windows works better than the one for Unix. But, here goes truth:

My connection isn’t very fast (top speed is ~200kB/s down, ~60 up). uTorrent gets me there, allowing me to use the whole potential of my cheap connection.

Transmission doesn’t.

I pick uTorrent. End of story.

By: i2ehan

i2ehan — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 08:48:18 +0000

Couldn’t disagree more. Don’t take my word for it however, try it for yourself: download the latest uTorrent beta, enable port forwarding, and you’ll witness a substantial increase in your DL speed; and I mean substantial! I am virtually capped out at my max DL speed, it’s insane! Tip: Since some clients limit the minimum required upload speed (otherwise, the download ratio is drastically affected), even at 10kB/s UL limit, your DL speed can cap at max! Use this only when necessary however, don’t leech! Keep in mind, others are sacrificing their speed for your downloads, so seed people, seed!!!

By: rakoth

rakoth — Thu, 07 May 2009 22:22:06 +0000

Right, noticed that too.

By: Lucas

Lucas — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 13:03:06 +0000

This “feature” is the reason why transmission is denied in so many trackers. It doesn’t respect the protocol correctly. With torrents, you take what you give, in other words, the bigger is your upload rate, the bigger will be your download rate. Servers and clients have to stick for that for an just torrent world. Transmission tricks that, and download everything, not giving the other poor leechers their piece of the cake. uTorrent not, it’s completely addicted to the rules!

By: Bradley

Bradley — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 11:22:16 +0000

I’m excited to see uTorrent on the Mac and started using it right away. Sometimes though, with big files (like 3+GB) it starts to stall out on me and has to be restarted before it will continue downloading. It recognizes available peers but just doesn’t start transferring data. Out or In.

By: petar

petar — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 01:19:27 +0000

i am using utorrent. before i used transmission. with both clients i got download speeds of 1.5MB. personally, i think utorrent is more stable.
cheers

By: Tawau Bloggers Unity » Blog Archive » 10 Ways To Speed Up Torrent Downloads

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 05:48:27 +0000

[...] The settings should be similarly configurable for other clients too. Mac users shuld also check our Transmission vs. uTorrent [...]

By: simon

simon — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 11:35:15 +0000

Utorrent is not great on features it is true, BUT and its a big BUT, I have found it to be much much faster that Transmission. I have a Mac pro with 8gigs of Ram and a 20 mB broadband connection on a dynamic IP address.. Utorrent downloads regularly at up to 2mb/sec which is more than double the speed i can get with Transmission. Also with Transmission I would often lose connections for some reason.

Utorrent is bound to get better and I think will become the 1st choice for Mac users sooner than later

By: Matthew

Matthew — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 14:06:42 +0000

Same as on Windows just set uTorrent to not automatically start downloads when you add them, then you can manually specify to skip certain files in a torrent. Though it does not yet have the pop-up dialog like in Windows version when you disable auto-start of downloads.

By: ss

ss — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 01:56:48 +0000

ok, this is about utorrent vs transmission on the mac, but really, i haven’t found vuze to be much of a hog at all, and it’s the most feature rich client available, although it can be used in dum dum mode. i have a fairly new macbook, but my activity monitor says it uses between 6-11% cpu (on a core 2 duo) and 109 mb of real memory (1GB virtual). this is not bad considering i have 106 torrents and quite a few over 4gb & 2 over 20gb and 1 over 50GB.

bit tryant is something to consider looking into as well.

By: 10 Ways To Speed Up Torrent Downloads - BudiHermawan

10 Ways To Speed Up Torrent Downloads - BudiHermawan — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 01:51:05 +0000

[...] The settings should be similarly configurable for other clients too. Mac users shuld also check our Transmission vs. uTorrent [...]

By: bobberto

bobberto — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 22:50:09 +0000

i would just like to say that i was a loyal utorrent user on pc and when i switched to mac i started using transmission. transmission is great but when utorrent for mac came out i had to make the switch…although utorrent has a LONG way to go, i still prefer using it and there are many features missing…download times aren’t that different and i don’t mind selecting files during the downlaod

By: Skwang

Skwang — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 17:33:35 +0000

uTorrent has been considerably and consistently faster for me than Transmission.

By: Jackson

Jackson — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 17:29:33 +0000

Excuse me. Before you start to accuse someone of not knowing a thing, people make mistakes.

Now, Sean was referring to Transmission for Linux. I may not know what features it has or doesn’t but I didn’t deny that it did. The point I was trying to get across about Transmission was its simplicity.

By: darkstar13

darkstar13 — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 17:18:56 +0000

Disregard everything that Jackson has said in the comments. He obviously does not know a thing he is talking about…

First, Transmission does offer groups/categorization.

Secondly, although Transmission does not include RSS feeds you can easily implement this. The developers have noted that they do not have any plans in the near future for built-in RSS, but a developer has made an app called Automatic to do this work for you. It is a simple helper that runs from System Prefs and manages all of your RSS feeds! Really nice! Get it? Automatic Transmission… catchy.

All in all… I have run uTorrent on my Mac, Transmission on my Mac, a plethora of clients on Windows, Transmission daemon on a FreeNAS. I have come to enjoy Transmission on my Mac and can even live with the WebGUI on my FreeNAS for Transmission downloads directly to the server.

By: Consine

Consine — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 13:20:36 +0000

Actually Transmission does have categorization, it’s called groups and works similarly to labels in Finder.

By: Tristan

Tristan — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 18:30:44 +0000

I second this. µTorrent appears to be doing better than transmission at being lightweight and at download speed and peer management.

The latest versions of Transmissions stopped working for me recently on top of that. 0 peers, never connects. µTorrent it is.

By: Tristan

Tristan — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 18:28:11 +0000

A minor and insignificant difference…

By: 10 Ways To Speed Up Torrent Downloads | MakeUseOf.com

10 Ways To Speed Up Torrent Downloads | MakeUseOf.com — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 12:17:08 +0000

[...] The settings should be similarly configurable for other clients too. Mac users shuld also check our Transmission vs. uTorrent [...]

By: K

Sat, 07 Feb 2009 00:42:58 +0000

Don’t know who the guy with the ponytail is, but this is my first, well now… second post. And the forum added the picture automatically. Must be another K out there. So to the other K, my apologies.

By: K

Sat, 07 Feb 2009 00:39:38 +0000

After testing both, I have to say that uTorrent is getting much better connection speeds than Transmission. This is a shame, since I like Transmissions features better. It gives you more control over download location, specific files, tones to notify you when the download is complete, custom seed settings per file, etc. Transmission also has built in blocklist feature. So to use uTorrent, I have to run PeerGuardian, which has the negative side affect of blocking time.apple.com, stopping my clock time synchronization. I have to add a custom allow list get around this. On a positive note, uTorrent takes up much less CPU cycles. Transmission was running 22 on average, and uTorrent is taking about 4 cycles. Between CPU load and network speed, uTorrent wins.

By: Mike Anderson

Mike Anderson — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 18:33:37 +0000

I switched to uTorrent from Transmission because I liked the look and feel better, and also because I was downloading to NFS (big mistake), Transmission spent most of it’s time checking data. I missed the webUI capability in Transmission a lot, and it would be one of the features uTorrent would have to match. Transmission seems to download faster, and just seems more stable. I hooked up a local drive for my downloads and have moved back to Transmission where I’ll stay until something overwhelming in uTorrent can bring me back.

By: Densets

Densets — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 04:21:31 +0000

Well, there is still no graph in uTorrent. Its one of the things i look for in a mac client but havent still found one yet, besides Torrent station which i cant get cuz the web no longer exists. I need the graph . For now i use windows utorrent with crossover becuase it has a graph. hope they get that feature running.

By: Jackson

Jackson — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 11:58:12 +0000

There’s a balance between your download and upload speeds when you limit the upload. You will find that uTorrent will give you a better download speed when you increase the upload slightly. Say 30KB/s.

By: Jackson

Jackson — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 11:52:47 +0000

It’s simpler, don’t you think?

By: Juan

Juan — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 09:00:36 +0000

I have just switched to mac and was using utorrent previously on Pc. I have noticed that the speed has greatly reduced on the mac version. I was previously getting total download speeds up to 800kbps with my upload limited to 5kbps. Now with the same settings I seem to only hit 30kbps max, doesn’t matter how many files I’m downloading 30kbps total is all it will get. Feels like i’ve gone back to 1999 with my dial up modem. If I set uploads to unlimited then the download goes up heaps but my ISP counts uploads towards my monthly usage so I can’t afford to do that.

Any suggestions?

By: Johnny Boy

Johnny Boy — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 07:35:02 +0000

I notice that you can manually select the upload and download speeds on both programs. The problem I have with utorrent on mac is the same thing I didn’t like about it on windows. If you set download for unlimited and then limit the upload, it automatically limits your download. Not so with transmission. I can set it for unlimited download and a stingy 5kb upload and it works just fine without seeing the need to penalize my download speed. On utorrent, I tried to limit my seed ratio to 1. All it did was just keep uploading. Not so with transmission. It will cut off at 1 like I set it to.

By: andrew Tillcock

andrew Tillcock — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 22:14:08 +0000

ive been using UTorrent for mac for about a week now. Its no longer beta, 0.9.0.4 ,Me too but cannot get speeds above 40-50kbps.
I am using an airport extreme on a home network and was looking for some help/tips.
I used to have bittornado on my win and dynex router forwarded and could get speeds of over 300 kbps on good days and would love to return to that.HELP