[Simon]

I've tried using BitTorrent OS X (version 4.1.8 currently) and it works very well. Unfortunately it lacks decent documentation. Can somebody explain to me what the abbreviations in the peer window mean? I've seen L, R, -, *, s, and i. What do they stand for?

[Apple Pro Underwear]

hmm.. I wondered that too — *bump*

also, does putting our macs to "sleep" still allow us to seed for others? or do we literally have to leave the computer on and run a screensaver or turn the monitor off?

thx

[mpancha]

Originally Posted by Apple Pro Underwear

hmm.. I wondered that too — *bump*

also, does putting our macs to "sleep" still allow us to seed for others? or do we literally have to leave the computer on and run a screensaver or turn the monitor off?

thx

i dont know what the letters stand for.

but as for seeding while the computer sleeps, it doesn't work. the computer has to be on. you would have to go the screensaver, monitor off route.

[wataru]

Originally Posted by Apple Pro Underwear

also, does putting our macs to "sleep" still allow us to seed for others? or do we literally have to leave the computer on and run a screensaver or turn the monitor off?

What in the world do you think sleep would do if not suspend all activity?

[Apple Pro Underwear]

Originally Posted by wataru

What in the world do you think sleep would do if not suspend all activity?

wataru,

i'm dumb.


now tell me, if I leave my computer on 24/7 — should I do anything to protect the computer? Just make sure "put harddrive to sleep when possible" is active right? there is no damage I can do to my powermac G5 (dual 2.0 ghz) by doing this right? also, have any idea how much energy is being used throughout the day?

i got invited to "oink" music community, so now i can't leech anymore without consequences.

[demograph68]

ooh, that place rocks. AND YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF YOURSELF.

[Simon]

Originally Posted by Apple Pro Underwear

now tell me, if I leave my computer on 24/7 — should I do anything to protect the computer?

If the computer is being operated within operational temperature specs (i.e. vents not blocked, not running in an oven, etc.) you don't have to do anything. It's a Power Mac. It was built to run 24/7. That's what you paid for.

Just make sure "put harddrive to sleep when possible" is active right?

You can do that, but if you have BT running, chances are the disk will never go to sleep since it is constantly writing and reading little bits of data. Nothing to worry about. The disk was built to be used. Use it.

there is no damage I can do to my powermac G5 (dual 2.0 ghz) by doing this right?

Nope. It was built for that purpose.

[Apple Pro Underwear]

Originally Posted by demograph68

ooh, that place rocks. AND YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF YOURSELF.

Ashamed of myself for protecting myself against corporations installing spyware on my mac?

Ashamed for being an educated consumer and trying my music on before I buy it?

Or ashamed of myself for wearing a pink G-String?


in all fairness, i buy about $30 per month on CDs. i also support my local indie record shop by buying tickets there.

[Apple Pro Underwear]

Originally Posted by Simon

If the computer is being operated within operational temperature specs (i.e. vents not blocked, not running in an oven, etc.) you don't have to do anything. It's a Power Mac. It was built to run 24/7. That's what you paid for.

You can do that, but if you have BT running, chances are the disk will never go to sleep since it is constantly writing and reading little bits of data. Nothing to worry about. The disk was built to be used. Use it.

Nope. It was built for that purpose.

thank you sir!

[Simon]

You're very welcome.

Now, could somebody help us with the BitTorrent stuff?

[osxrules]

You guys should use Azureus. It is so much better than the official bittorrent.

It even allows you to choose if you want to download individual parts of a torrent. It has never crashed on me once in all my 3-4 years using it and I've downloaded about 200-300GBs of stuff.

I gave up on Tomato torrent and official bittorrent after using them for a couple of months.

For the abbreviations thing, I didn't see any in bittorrent version 4.2 but still get Azureus because it is fairly straight forward and there's a new version just out too:

http://azureus.sourceforge.net/

[wataru]

I prefer Azureus too, except for the fact that it eats up a lot more RAM and CPU than the official client.

[wingchuner]

Here's a kick A** client that uses hardly any CPU...

http://transmission.m0k.org/

[Simon]

I tried Azureus and hated it. I find it bloated, ugly and confusing. It beets me how a simple BT client can use so many resources. Just my 2¢.

[mduser63]

I like Azureus's features, but it has to be the most unstable, slow, bloated, poorly written app I have installed on my Mac. It hangs on quit nearly every time slowing my machine to a crawl and requiring me to kill the offending process using Terminal.

[- - e r i k - -]

I started using Azeurus for it's torrent-healthfeature and for the widget.

[italiano]

wingchuner - that transmission link IS GREAT! Coming in MUCH FASTER on my Cable Modem than Bittorrent was 5 minutes ago... I tried em all but TRANSMISSION ROX!

[wingchuner]

Originally Posted by italiano

wingchuner - that transmission link IS GREAT! Coming in MUCH FASTER on my Cable Modem than Bittorrent was 5 minutes ago... I tried em all but TRANSMISSION ROX!

it's a great app, it keeps improving with every new release of it..another less intensive resource hog, then the azureus BT client would be http://www.bitsonwheels.com This is the second best OS X BT client in my opinion.

[esXXI]

Eyech Azeurus. Such a horrible app - if someone's going to port an app they should at least try not to make it look like ass, and you shouldn't be spammed with windows on first launch screaming "You need to upgrade Java!"

The official client is the nicest, although it does have it's own problems (namely dragging items around the list messes up the window and sometimes it can take too much CPU), but at least it works.

[Self-pimp] We've got a pretty nice BT widget (it's own client, doesn't need to be run along with any 'proper' app available at our site. [/Self-pimp]

[Ratm]

Here ya go.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azureus

[wingchuner]

[Self-pimp] We've got a pretty nice BT widget (it's own client, doesn't need to be run along with any 'proper' app available at our site. [/Self-pimp][/QUOTE]


This widget is all pretty, but you need to implement the 2 most important options into it. You need to allow port choosing, upload/download control.

[osxrules]

I tried all those other Bittorrent apps but what they lack is features. None of them can download individual files from a torrent or prioritize files or limit the upload of a selection of files. I can select a set of uploads and distribute a global upload cap between them.

I also doubt that they are more stable than Azureus which has never crashed once in my whole time using it. I used to use Tomato Torrent until I got frustrated by the lack of the above features. Now if you don't need those features then I can understand how people would favour them but I prefer stability and features over GUI performance when I download GBs of files.

The UI in the new Azureus is faster than it used to be but it does still hog CPU. About 10% on average. But what I found with say the official bittorrent is that it gives each download its own resources. Azureus has no significant overhead for a lot of downloads.

As for speed, I often max out the 200kbytes/s download I allow Azureus to get. I can download 15GB in a week or so. I also find trackers are more welcoming to Azureus than other programs.

I'm sticking with Azureus. What I do wish would happen is that Java performance would improve especially under OS X. Java programs generally use huge amounts of resources and take ages to launch. I don't understand why this is the case. Is the OS X implementation of the Java VM extremely bloated?

[Sarc]

Originally Posted by osxrules

I tried all those other Bittorrent apps but what they lack is features. None of them can download individual files from a torrent or prioritize files or limit the upload of a selection of files. I can select a set of uploads and distribute a global upload cap between them.

Azureus can do all that ....

[spambot]

To answer the OP
The L/R column indicates which side the peer connection originated, Remote or Local. If you block BitTorrent's port(s) on your firewall or misreport your ip address to the tracker, you will likely see only L's in this column, because remote peers cannot initiate connections with your client.
The 'their' and 'my' columns indicate attitude of the remote peer towards you and you towards the remote peer, respectively.
- is indifference
i is Interested
s is Snubbed
* I believe it means the remote peer is trying to start getting data from you. In my brief investigation just now I have not seen a * in the my column, only 1 at a time in the their column, always on a black row, and always first appearing on a row with ul rate 0, and disappearing from that row after the ul rate has become non-zero. [Side note - a black row means there is an active data connection, a gray row means there is not. Non-zero transmission rate values in gray rows quickly decay to 0.]
Peer A is interested in peer B if B has some segment of the torrent that A wants.
Peer A will snub peer B if B is uploading too slowly for A's tastes, and A becomes impatient. (There may be other reasons for snubbing, like too many hash fails on the pieces received from B, or peers can be snubbed manually). Though B may (claim to) have pieces A wants, A will not ask for data from B while snubbing B. Other clients (like Azureus) give more control over this behavior than the official client.
If there were a c it would probably indicate choking. If A chokes B, it means A will refuse to send data to B. I am actually surprised to not see this; I suppose the official client simply does not explicitly expose its choking in the user interface.


As for Azureus performance, I found [under OS X.4.3] 2.3.0.6 used about 75% more cpu and 60% more ram than 2.3.0.2 when running with Java 1.4.2, or alternatively, 2.3.0.6 with Java 1.5 used about the same ram as 2.3.0.2 with Java 1.4.2 but had 275% the cpu usage, so after a couple days of testing I reverted to 2.3.02.
It is the case that Azureus consistently fails to close its windows under OS X.4.x (a problem that did not exist under OS X.3.x), and requires being quit from the Terminal.
I have not used any of the other clients much in the last couple years, so do not have any useful inter-client performance comparisons.

[Since EBCDIC]

Well, I just tried the official BitTorrent client (4.2.0) against Transmission (0.4) on 4 mbps Comcast cable. The former kept on crapping out after a short while, whereas the latter seems to be cruising along at 40-60 KB/s download. So I'm pretty pleased with reading this thread.

I'm hoping to get some modern advice on capping the upload speed. Is 70% still a well-accepted value, or is 80% better? I'm running a vanilla 10.4.4 system excepting that I'm using port 50001 for BT.

[Ozmodiar]

I hate (HATE!) bit torrent. I have never had a successful use of any BT software, mac or pc, and even right now I'm connected to to 20+ peers on two torrent files and downloading at around 0.5 KB/sec. Hate.

[Simon]

Are you sitting behind any sort of firewall? Mac OS X has one built in, so do the AP Base Station and Express. Many companies and universities block high ports for outgoing and incoming traffic. You should make sure ports 6881-6889 are open.

[Ozmodiar]

Hmm, I just checked around a little and I don't have the OS X firewall turned on, and my Netgear wireless router settings don't seem to have any options for opening ports. Is that something I do through System Preferences, or am I not seeing it in the router setup?

[Simon]

The router setup should show it if it's in there.

Maybe your provider is blocking ports? Even though it's unbelievable (at least outside of countries like North Korea) I've heard there are providers that block high ports.