Halite, a Fast and Lightweight BitTorrent Client
During the last three years, not many new BitTorrent clients have surfaced. Together, the likes of uTorrent, Azureus and BitComet have a 90% market share, with uTorrent being the most popular client. For a new client it is nearly impossible to catch up with these giants, but Halite might just stand a chance.
Still a relatively unknown BitTorrent client at the moment, Halite is named after a mineral – rock salt in plain English.
The open source application is developed by Irishman Eóin O’Callaghan, who started the project in 2006, and has been adding features and improvements ever since. We’ve been following Halite’s development for quite a while now and over the past few months it has become a fully-featured, yet lightweight BitTorrent client.
One of the greatest strengths of Halite is that it uses minimal system resources. The latest release uses less than 10,000k of memory, half of what uTorrent uses on average and only a fraction of the consumption of Vuze or BitComet.
Halite started to develop a steady user base after uTorrent, the most widely used BitTorrent client, was sold to BitTorrent Inc. At the time, many uTorrent users were afraid that their favorite BitTorrent client would be ruined by the company, and some abandoned the application. Although these worries turned out to be unfounded, Halite has certainly become one of uTorrent’s main competitors.
Halite supports all of the basic features the average downloader requires including encryption, selective downloading, a torrent creator and more. So far there is no support for disk caching, seeding preferences and torrent queuing, but these and other features are on the to do list, and will be implemented in the future.
The download speeds of Halite are pretty much comparable to clients like Vuze and uTorrent. Some people report that it is significantly faster than uTorrent, but in the TorrentFreak test lab we were not able to replicate these results. The most important thing is to configure your torrent client correctly.
Overall I would say that Halite is a great BitTorrent client for those people who are looking for a client that uses minimal system resources and has all the basic features. Worth a try.
Halite screenshots
