Sunday, May 18, 2008

BitTorrent client showdown - Transmission vs mldonkey

I'm giving up mldonkey for transmission+clutch for the following reasons:

  • Smaller memory footprint and less CPU intensive - this is especially important in a small embedded system like the DNS-323. For comparison sake, top reports 54% memory usage(sometimes growing to near 90%!) for mldonkey but only 7% for transmission (or 25% including lighttpd and php for clutch)
  • BitTorrent protocol only - since I only use bittorrent protocol, I do not need such a heavy weight client like mldonkey (which includes other protocols like file download aka HTTP/FTP, edonkey, overnet, gnutella and fasttrack).
  • Separation of UI from the core - unlike mldonkey (which offers telnet and http interface by default), the only built-in interface in transmission is the CLI (aka Command Line Interface) via transmission-remote. This again gives you the chance to reduce resource utilization by (1) not running the Clutch interface hence no web server required or (2) running Clutch in a shared web server on the box (unlike mldonkey which uses an exclusive built-in standalone web server)
  • Efficiency of the client - after 3 days with both clients turned on downloading the same files, it seems that transmission is more efficient than mldonkey by achieving better sustained speeds and yet using less connections.

Transmission and Clutch setup guide here.

1 comment:

borekon said...

That post make me to install transmission instead mldonkey. Thanks!