Halite, a Fast and Lightweight BitTorrent Client
Written by Ernesto on July 21, 2008During 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
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65 Responses
the more choice the better.
open source is the way forward.
oh and btw #1 woo hoo
lol
knock off utorrent, if you want open source choose utorrent 1.6.1
woo #2
@ rzdude
3rd you mean.
Looks good. Be giving it a spin soon ^^
I should try it out, I hope there is a Linux version. Linux has Deluge and KTorrent which are great, but more choice is good.
“Some people report that it is significantly faster”
Just guessing, but I’d bet these people are Comcast users. I don’t know whether Comcast has taken to throttling uTorrent – but I know that when I jumped from BitTorrent to Transmission, my nominal download speed doubled and upload speed quadrupled. But most importantly, my functional speeds went up by a factor of 10, since I was no longer being constantly reset/crashed.
Comcast = arsebiters.
Halite seems very similar to Deluge. Could someone compare them?
woo #1
@2 – uTorrent 1.6.1 wasn’t open source either.
Still – nice to see an article about a BT client. :)
“knock off utorrent, if you want open source choose utorrent 1.6.1″
I’m not aware of any microtorrent version being open source.
The more choice the better… and open source to boot!
Good luck and godspeed Eóin O’Callaghan!
ungrounded = unfounded*
I can agree that a better choice is a good thing however I fail to see why I should ever abandon uTorrent for this. Utorrent gets the job done, period.
Trojan!
Dont download its a trojan.
NOD32 warned me!
@14
How can an open source program be a trojan? Just download the source and compile it yourself.
http://www.virustotal.com/analisis/f22c94b1b8c8484e2314fe017eeca736
to the noob @14
@15,16
Is the humor of that statement completely lost on you?
:It was a jab at Nod 32, not the stupid bittorrent client.
I believe YHBT
I thought by the first two screen shots that it would have a linux version, but it doesn’t seem to – am I stupid or is it hidden? :)
Eventhough azureus is bloated… Its seriously very fast…utorrent is resource saver but as for me it doesnt do the job well..,
http://www.alphaboard.co.cc/blog
Anyway will give it a try….
Eventhough azureus is bloated… Its seriously very fast…utorrent is resource saver but as for me it doesnt do the job well..,
http://www.alphaboard.co.cc/blog
Anyway will give it a try….
It annoys me how so many people equate open source to better. Open source doesn’t make stuff any better.
“It annoys me how so many people equate open source to better. Open source doesn’t make stuff any better.”
All programs have bugs and/or can be improved in some way.
Closed source means the user relies on the developer to address this.
Open source means anyone can do it (including the developer) = faster bugfixes/improvements = more stable = better.
+ other people can provide feature enhancements. I just wonder if private trackers would ban it so that people don’t hack it to provide false results.
So ? Just hack it to report itself as uTorrent or whatever and they wont know any better :p
As far as BT client choices, go, Halite isn’t horrible. Don’t hold your breath waiting for enhancements, though. The development for this has been like molasses.
sadly no mac version :(
A nice alternative to uTorrent. If only uTorrent wasn’t so perfect – which it is. It has NEVER crashed, flipped out, hogged up system resources. The only thing the new client has got against uT is that it’s open source so maybe we’ll see cool plugins for it like for Azureus.
Speaking of Azureus, now that it has become the bloated, unnecessary POS known as Vuze, this client could steal a lot of it’s userbase and become a new, lighter Azureus replacement.
utorrent has it’s shortcomings. It does also crash occasionally, even with the best of conditions. I could list a number of potential basic improvements altho it normally gets the job done sooner or later.
I’d like to see better user control over files within torrents for one thing. Namely, speed and priorities. Better privacy and encryption would also be good. I fail to see why our IP addresses should be visible to all, even tho there’s no option to prevent it, and also what’s the point since there’s no related peer or seeder controls? Also I hate the way it tries to download primarily from a few peers with the least data rather than from seeders. Non seeders are conserving their upload bandwidth until completion, so all you get from them is less than 1k/sec. Then there’s pieces which stall at 99.9% and refuse to complete. This must be client related also. Just a few gripes.
I love Halite! I’ve been using it since before it was cool (aka this post lol). Now with a growing userbase they will start to add some more features. Can’t wait!
Well for an advanced user like me , Halite better have options like seeding preferences n others which my present(n ultimate) client vuze offers. With the no. of addons vuze hs got, I don think any client even comes close to it..
Nice to see Halite getting some attention.
Oh and the pink halite is pretty :D
woo #34
but seriously. its still not that good.
Quote: :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…”
Who says their worries are unfounded? We have yet to see…I am still convinced the big awakening will come!
Nice write up. ANY Libtorrent based client is worth a try. ; )
so basically its utorrent if it never sold out only it has a little less features and uses less recources …im in
oh god. noob
@24
the source code is free for anyone to play around. but only the developers can see change the code and are allowed commit access.
has anyone realized utorrent1.7.7 is not seeding?
i still use rTorrent or Transmission (but rtorrent more often)
they are just simply small, fast and can be used without gui.
@38 You too ?
Time to switch.
Halite is far from being as smooth and low on resources as utorrent was, but being able to seed again beets it any time.
Looking into getting it to compile on my machine later this day …
@ 23
do u know how often azureus updates? cause they get PAID to do it, we dont have to rely on whether or not the developer feels like it. unless of course u code in whatever language this was compiled in, then u can make ur own improvements.
woo #39
But yea i think i will stick to utorrent.. it has been very faithful so far.
“Open source means anyone can do it”
That doesn’t sound like a recommendation to me.
@41 – not everyone who contributes to Azureus gets paid for it.
I going to try this definitely , i ‘m hoping to get good grades @ Demonoid
seed(more)
leech(less)
“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.”
I will wait ’till this certain future!
Thanks.
“torrentfreak test lab”? Wtf? You have a test lab now? With white coats an shit? And here i thought this site was run by one person, silly me.
About uTorrent’s RAM usage — did you make sure to exclude/disable RAM caching?
My copy of uTorrent is currently using 248MB of RAM as I have a forced cache size of 256MB + it setup to not dump old pieces. This is to reduce my hard drive wear as much as possible.
Heck, on my seedbox I have a cache size of 750MB so that I can cache a whole TV show into RAM and seed without a single HD read (once it’s all cached). After a few hours of seeding at 100mbit, I have around 5 million hits to the cache and a couple hundred to the hard drive (as the file was initially read into RAM).
For this reason alone, I wouldn’t recommend Halite (yet). Looks promising, but disk caching is just such a must IMO.
Even better: Transmission [transmission.m0k.org]
People who report things are faster and just noobs fooling themselves.
Noobs that speak out are anoying, stfu.
Halite 2.9MB
uTorrent 214KB
Which one is smaller?
Maybe if you’re gonna blog about software you should mention somewhere what operating system is needed to run it? I had to go hunting just to find out it was another lazy-ass windows-only project.
QQ moar, penguin
> “Maybe if you’re gonna blog about software you should mention somewhere what operating system is needed to run it? I had to go hunting just to find out it was another lazy-ass windows-only project.”
I agree. I thought it was also for Linux.
@50 – Too bad theres no Windows version :(
@52 – Do you plan opn putting it on a floppy or something?
2.9MB isnt that big and installed it only goes to about 4MB, still small. Besides, Id be more concerned about memory usage, and Halite does well at that.
Cool. I’ve been a big uTorrent fan, but I’ll give Halite a try. I’m using it right now and so far so good. Perhaps not as polished as uTorrent, but the important features seem to be there.
Ummm, is that really the whole article? Which platforms does this client run on?
The latest version 1.7.7 of uTorrent (214 Kb only in size) works perfectly and better than 1.61. To me there seems no reason to keep using version 1.61.
That said, I downloaded Halite 0.3.1 (2.47 megs)and tried it. It is very good indeed but I find that uTorrent is still the numero uno.
I’ve used Halite quite abit, and of course it’s great that this stuff comes out especially as it’s open-source. From what I can tell from all my use of it is that it’s not so resource friendly as first thought, I’ve seen Halite use about 30Mb of RAM, plus I love the Auto Shutdown feature of uTorrent, something Halite lacks. So I’ve decided to start using uTorrent 1.6 Build 474 (this being the last release before uTorrent was bought out).
But I do applaud Halite for filling a gap which was once filled, but I just don’t see (at the moment) why anyone would use this over uTorrent 1.6 Build 474.
im gonna get this just cuz of the irish connection, hope the sites i use have no compatability issues.
however from the exploits of utorrent 1.6 id rather leave alone for a week or two…..
big up eoin o callaghan
Hmm i’m going to have to try this later.
so is that mineral client able to run so nicely selfcontained in one dir only like µt can do from a USB stick for example, or does it spill some files all over the system no matter what?
utorrent till i die!! =P
Utorrent uses 4,564k of memory on average. Not 10,000k!
For those who like uTorrent, I tried it and it ATE my system resources, plus, it kept shutting down my LAN! As far as I am concerned, uTorrent is junk! I am looking for something that will NOT trash my LAN by taking over ALL the bandwidth without giving ME some control. I would rather wait a few extra minutes or even hours than cut my kids off in the middle of a dungeon – THAT is just RUDE.
Aug 01, 2008 at 19:22 by Anonymous
then you probably run it in default setup with the local peer discovery active and unlimited local peer bandwith exchange that it trashed your LAN.
And when you have run the setup wizard at first start and choose the correct value for your bandwith it will not take over all your bandwith.
Oh, and µT gives fairly exact control how much bandwith to use. You must enter the value’s you want.
Pebkac is not the programs fault!
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