µTorrent r0x0rz!

I've been seeding torrents for the different Pwop shows for a couple of weeks now. At first, I used Azureus, simply because that's what Carl initially recommended, plus it supported RSS feeds. Then, I discovered µTorrent.

Azureus is by far the most popular BitTorrent client at the moment. However, it is written in Java, and consumes a lot of memory. "But, memory is cheap," you might say. True, but my seeding system only has 256MB in it to start with, so I'm looking for something that is REALLY light on the physical memory.

That's the niche that µTorrent fills. The whole program is contained in a small 133kB executable, and it hardly consumes any memory when it runs. For example, it's been running for a couple weeks now, and I'm currently seeding 23 torrents, and the process is only consuming 2.8MB of physical memory and another 5MB of virtual memory. Compare that to the 40-60MB of physical memory that I sometimes saw Azureus using!

I'm not sure how well the built-in RSS capabilities of µTorrent are. To be truthful, after discovering that it has a built-in directory watcher that will automatically load any .torrent file that is placed into a drop directory, I just rolled my own RSS consumer.

Note: There was originally more info here that detailed the small "PwopWatcher" app that I created to consume the Pwop RSS feeds. I moved that content to it's own post:

http://jasonf-blog.blogspot.com/2006/02/pwopwatcher.html