Why I went back to utorrent with wine

[sark666]

I'd love to use a native linux client (preferably gtk2), but have been using utorrent via wine for quite some time and it works quite well.

I tried the gtk2 clients last year, and deluge looks like it's proceedng nicely so decided to try it again.

I tried it a few weeks, but switched back frustrated with some little things.


First, say I want only 50 megs of a 12 gig torrent, well to select individual files you have to enable precaching. So I have to cover 12 gigs space to get 50 megs?

Second, you can specify # of active torrents but not # of active downloads. I found sometimes I'd start up a torrent to download, but might have 5 things seeding and have reaching my limit (if in this case i indicate 5 active torrents). The download wouldn't start until one of those seeds complete. I shouldn't have to manually intervene to have a download have top priority.

And last, I usually share my torrents 1:1, but if I've downloaded something with deluge, shut it down and say move/delete the completed torrent without it ever having seeded to the ratio, when I relaunch deluge, it will start redownloading the torrent again. Whereas utorrent simply says 'file not found' and allows you to restart the torrent, or tell it where the files are now located.

Are any of these planned to be adressed in .6?

[sluthead]

Yeah plus too many bugs have sent me back to azureus. I'm not willing to use utorrent with wine. Azureus isn't as good as deluge but at least im not frustrated with it.

[johnnyg]

First, say I want only 50 megs of a 12 gig torrent, well to select individual files you have to enable precaching. So I have to cover 12 gigs space to get 50 megs?

you can read the difference between compact and full allocation in the faq.
but yes if you want to download a 50MB file from inside a 12GB files, you will need to have 12GB of free space available.
utorrent does the same thing
it's a limitation of bittorrent not deluge.

Second, you can specify # of active torrents but not # of active downloads. I found sometimes I'd start up a torrent to download, but might have 5 things seeding and have reaching my limit (if in this case i indicate 5 active torrents). The download wouldn't start until one of those seeds complete. I shouldn't have to manually intervene to have a download have top priority.

in 0.6 you will be able to specify the number of active seeding vs downloading

And last, I usually share my torrents 1:1, but if I've downloaded something with deluge, shut it down and say move/delete the completed torrent without it ever having seeded to the ratio, when I relaunch deluge, it will start re-downloading the torrent again. Whereas utorrent simply says 'file not found' and allows you to restart the torrent, or tell it where the files are now located.

deluge will automatically start downloading a file when it cannot find it, afaik this is the same in 0.6.
however for the second part, you can enable the move torrent plugin and then use switch torrent source to specify the new location of the torrent (it only works if you move the torrent but not actually rename it).

if you're still unhappy with 0.5 then by all means continue using utorrent under wine but keep on eye on deluge so that you can try 0.6 when it's released (or you could try the nightlies if you're feeling daring) because it is MUCH better to be using a native linux client than one under wine (not to mention it's better to be using an open source client than a closed source client which is owned by bittorrent, inc.)

[sark666]

Thanks for the response.

you can read the difference between compact and full allocation in the faq.
but yes if you want to download a 50MB file from inside a 12GB files, you will need to have 12GB of free space available.
utorrent does the same thing
it's a limitation of bittorrent not deluge.

Hmm, I see the link you have provided, but I just the other day grabbed some select files from a huge torrent and my drive was almost full, and most certainly couldn't accommodate the full torrent. I think utorrent only precaches the select files and not the whole torrent, whereas I believe deluge caches the entire thing regardless of selection.

Great to hear active downloads will make it into 6.

It would be great to have some option to not auto downloaded when the file isn't found, esp considering it was seeding the file the last time deluge was launched. But maybe for the future.

[johnnyg]

well the beauty of deluge is that it's open source.
if you know python, you could create a plugin which does what you want.

[Nameless]

Actually, Deluge's selective download works pretty well. You will need space for the file you want to download, and for the next and previous one in piece order. These are the only files which will be fully allocated. I have tried this.

[unit731]

First, say I want only 50 megs of a 12 gig torrent, well to select individual files you have to enable precaching. So I have to cover 12 gigs space to get 50 megs?

you can read the difference between compact and full allocation in the faq.
but yes if you want to download a 50MB file from inside a 12GB files, you will need to have 12GB of free space available.
utorrent does the same thing
it's a limitation of bittorrent not deluge.

Did you notice the last sentence in the paragraph that you quoted "(unless you use sparse files)" ? Deluge worked very well with sparse file for version up to 0.5.8.7 and broke afterwards. Various forum members had pointed out this already. Did you ever try to reproduce the problem yourself? The frustration from that developer failed to acknowledge the existence of the bug and that the bug will not disappear by itself and force some of us to switch to other bt client or stick to previous version.

[bluearg]

First, say I want only 50 megs of a 12 gig torrent, well to select individual files you have to enable precaching. So I have to cover 12 gigs space to get 50 megs?

you can read the difference between compact and full allocation in the faq.
but yes if you want to download a 50MB file from inside a 12GB files, you will need to have 12GB of free space available.
utorrent does the same thing
it's a limitation of bittorrent not deluge.

That is not true. uTorrent allows you to download individual files allocating just enough disk space for them.

I just finished getting 2gb from a 74gb torrent on a drive with just 5gb of free space. So it might be a limitation of the bittorrent protocol, but clearly the uTorrent developers have found a way around it.

[johnnyg]

I have no idea what I was thinking when I wrote that,
deluge and utorrent allocate enough space for each file, not the entire torrent.
whether or not that was working in a certain build is another issue.