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

Source: Halite, a Fast and Lightweight BitTorrent Client

(Correct at 13:00GMT)

eMule Plus just missed the Top10, sitting where it does at number 11 with 21,018,700 downloads and is backed up by FTP project FileZilla at number 13 with 19,944,891 gets.

The seasoned file-sharer is only too aware of how important the Open Source software movement is to their cause and SourceForge’s stats appear to reinforce that. I wonder how long it will take the fresh-faced BitTorrent client Halite to break the Top 10? It’s currently ranked 8,117 with 8,848 downloads. 2008? 2009? Why not give it a try!

Source: P2P Projects Dominate SourceForge Top10