uTorrent Mac vs. Azureus Mac

Written by Ernesto on July 10, 2007 

uTorrent will be available on the Mac very soon and two weeks ago we wrote an early review. Today we read that anonymous statistics show that uTorrent will be twice as fast as Azureus, but is this really the case?

utorrent mac
In our review of uTorrent we concluded that we got slightly higher download speeds than in Azureus. However, it’s wasn’t a big enough difference to conclude that it was significantly faster than Azureus.

Slyck posted an article in which they publish statistical data they received from an anonymous source. According to these statistics uTorrent is more than twice as fast as Azureus, something that I find hard to believe.

Here’s what Slyck’s source reports:

Azureus Mac
Max Rate Seen: 297 KB/s
Average Rate: 235 KB/s
Consumed RAM: 155 MB
Average CPU: 20%

µTorrent Mac
Max Rate Seen: 840KB/s
Average Rate: 698 KB/s
Consumed RAM: 14 MB
Average CPU: 6%

Slyck received these stats from an anonymous source. Probably someone working at BitTorrent Inc because these stats are a little subjective to say the least. It is hard to get differences like this without cheating the protocol, something that Gilles BianRosa, CEO of Azureus, agrees with:

“We are not aware of any such stats, and clearly would doubt their validity. BitTorrent is a standard, and clients have, by design, limited ways to optimize transfer speeds. We have implemented features to optimize “around” the protocol, such as PeerExchange, but getting such wide variations without “bastardizing” the protocol beyond recognition (and making it not compliant/compatible in the process) make these numbers look VERY suspicious, if not ridiculous.”

I’ve been in the position to test an Alpha version of the Mac version of BitTorrent and I also tested Azureus’ Mac version and I came up with figures that clearly favor uTorrent, but not as dramatically as the statistics provided by BitTorrent Inc the anonymous source.

I decided to run my own comparison test using the exact same setup for both clients. The results are based on downloading 3 .torrent files that differed in swarm size and file size. Here’s what I found :

Azureus Mac
Max Rate Seen: 1.42 MB/s
Average Rate: 769 KB/s
Consumed RAM: 130 MB
Average CPU: 18%

µTorrent Mac
Max Rate Seen: 1.28 MB/s
Average Rate: 788 KB/s
Consumed RAM: 16 MB
Average CPU: 7%

The results are quite clear. It is hard to conclude that downloads will go faster with Azureus or uTorrent. Perhaps a difference can be found in a scientific and controlled setting, but no significant difference is observed in a real-life setting. One thing is clear though, the huge difference in download speed reported by Slyck’s anonymous source doesn’t make sense.

What we can see from both comparisons is that uTorrent for Mac, just like its Windows counterpart, uses less CPU and RAM. This is definitely a reason for me, and probably a lot of other BitTorrent users with me, to try uTorrent as soon as it’s released.

Previously: Anti-DRM T-Shirt Design Contest: The Winners are…

Next: The Pirate Bay Interview (Video)

18 Responses

1 Jul 10, 2007 at 20:37 by Jeff

It’s no surprise that Azureus uses a lot of RAM.

Does UPnP work in the mac uTorrent client? It sure doesn’t on PC, while Azureus UPnP works great.

It’s nice to get your client in active mode without jumping through hoops to forward ports on a router.

2 Jul 11, 2007 at 00:08 by sabret00the

[quote comment="131102"]It’s no surprise that Azureus uses a lot of RAM.

Does UPnP work in the mac uTorrent client? It sure doesn’t on PC, while Azureus UPnP works great.

It’s nice to get your client in active mode without jumping through hoops to forward ports on a router.[/quote]

UPnP works great for me on PC (uTorrent)

3 Jul 11, 2007 at 01:26 by Kos

The people on slyck should be warned. bogus article on their site.

4 Jul 11, 2007 at 01:48 by GiantBearn

You guys should stop taking articles from slyck.com get your own fucking ideas!

5 Jul 11, 2007 at 01:55 by Ernesto

[quote comment="131152"]You guys should stop taking articles from slyck.com get your own fucking ideas![/quote]

Can you give me one other article that was inspired by a Slyck post?

Don’t think so…

Besides that, we’re all friends in the P2P news scene ;)

6 Jul 11, 2007 at 01:56 by Jasper van Weerd

[quote comment="131152"]You guys should stop taking articles from slyck.com get your own fucking ideas![/quote]

My compliments on your motivation.

7 Jul 11, 2007 at 03:50 by Blah

Holy crap those speeds are fast. The absolute max I get is around 150kbs. You must have a crazy internet connection.

8 Jul 11, 2007 at 04:13 by di0rz`

I agree, the speed has nothing to do with the client used. Azureus isn’t a loweight client and everybody know it, otherwise it wouldn’t be coded in java.

9 Jul 11, 2007 at 04:37 by The 8472

Btw, w/o describing the exact test procedure it’s a bit hard to believe any stats. Since default settings vary (such as number of connections, number of upload slots) and download speeds also depend on the swarm, luck (since clients are picked at random) etc. the your test results are not really trustworthy.

And then there are torrents where the client’s implementation doesn’t play a role at all: the overseeded ones.

So please be more careful when comparing speed…

The CPU/Memory consumption on the other hand is obvious ;)

10 Jul 11, 2007 at 21:12 by Moe

don’t know bout ya but i got 2.4MB connection i tried all clients all sucks except Azureus from what i know i think Azureus Da Best torrent client ever…….

11 Jul 12, 2007 at 08:06 by Mark

Ah, finally!
I dropped Azureus for the Mac because it eats up your resources, and to be quite honest, that is about the only reason I see to change Torrent-clients at all.

I can also recommend Transmission, a very cool and light client, with an amazing arsenal of options beneath it’s friendly user-interface.

But, I will of course try µTorrent!

12 Jul 12, 2007 at 15:20 by MKB

Will this client be universal?

13 Jul 18, 2007 at 11:28 by Toak

MKB: Ofcourse it will be universal!

14 Nov 26, 2007 at 00:55 by Eric Davis

Azereus is just mad that it is sooooo slow and it takes up so much RAM. Please utorrent save me from Azereus soon.

15 Nov 28, 2007 at 04:02 by jhunt8

where is utorrent for mac? how much bloody longer

16 Dec 11, 2007 at 20:17 by Shree Mulay

I’m using uTorrent Windows Edition on my Mac OSX via CrossOver Trial Edition which works for 30 days. IT IS 10 TIMES FASTER THAN AZUREUS! I got the instructions on running uTorrent at http://torrentfreak.com/how-to-run-utorrent-in-osx/ It is well worth your time to do this!!!

17 Jan 21, 2008 at 01:31 by Dave

I’m using Transmission 1.01 and it is bad ass. I get 100kbs to 300kbs all the time. Average 150kbs. I will still get uTorrent for Mac when it comes. Note, use Bitjunkie it has the most seeds.

18 Feb 07, 2008 at 10:41 by wondergrl

Any new news on when the utorrent for mac is coming out. Transmission is still working way too slow on my mac.

Responses are closed

All remaining responses will continue to be archived. Use the TorrentFreak forums if you want to discuss something.