bittorrent is a resource hog ! 07. Nov 2006
After upgrading the memory of my Powerbook to a more reasonable amount, I did some testing with heavy weight applications to see how much more free memory there would actually be available when working with real life documents. The results were quite satisfying, but during testing I noticed something else. The Bittorrent Client I had running in the background consumed more than 20(!) percent of my cpu resources even though it was only handling two downloads at that time. Even for a greedy filesharing application this seemed like an awful lot of cpu usage to me.
I did some evaluation of Bittorrent clients a while ago, but only in terms of user interface and not in terms of cpu usage. I decided this might be a good moment to catch up on that. As my partner in crime I chose Peek-a-Boo, a very useful monitoring application. The competitors in my evaluation where the original Bittorrent Client, Transmission, BitRocket and Bits on Wheels. The task was simply to handle a dozen downloads simultaneously with the user interface minimized to the dock.
After initializing the downloads I waited a few minutes for the applications to connect to their peers and then opened a usage history window for each of them. The results where quite interesting and proved me right in my suspiciousness concerning the Bittorrent Client being a little too wasteful with cpu resources.
Due to the dynamic scaling of the graphs you can see that these applications actually play in different leagues concerning their cpu usage. The Bittorrent Client operated in the 20% scale, BitRocket and Bits on Wheels were both located in the 10% scale and Transmission was in the 5% scale. They all seemed to perform around equally well in terms of their download rate. These graphs are of course by no means scientific, but from my observation they do show representative values.
An interesting thing to note besides that, is that each application seems to generate a distinct shape when utilizing the cpu. The Bittorrent Client produces a very regular sawtooth-like pattern and Bits on Wheels shows a similar shape, but has a little more spikes. BitRocket has the most irregular shape of all applications and Transmission has the smoothest curve. After having observed these curves for a while - beware, now it’s getting really nerdy - I felt like it probably wouldn’t be too hard to identify the application by its cpu usage curve. Before I start getting carried though let me wrap this up by stating that my new default application for downloading torrents on Mac OS X is of course the wonderful Transmission, which also happens to have a quite polished minimalistic interface and very intuitive preferences. Congratulations to Eric Petit and his collaborators!
Interessanter Artikel. Ich bin bisher immer auf der Suche nach einem ressourecenschonendem Client gewesen. Leider ohne Erfolg. Ich verwende daher Bittorrent auch sehr selten.
man stelle sich vor, der herr prozessor hat eine applications-datenbank, merkt was da läuft und schießt unerwünschte prozesse wie bittorrent einfach selbst ab.
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wow. das nenn ich mal einen interessanten bericht. witzig, dass du jetzt auch in englisch schreibst. hast eine gute schreibe. respekt.
I find that my PC runs much slower since I upgraded to the latest version of the BitTorrent Client. So much so that when I closed BitTorrent my RAM usage dropped from 91% to 24%!
I think its about time I downloaded BitLord on my new PC.