Azureus 2.3.0.0

Finally got it to work properly after it upgraded from 2.2 to 2.3. Ok, so it did tell me that it worked best with jdk1.5, but I didn't expect it to be unable to map to port 6881 when I was running it on jdk1.4.2! Figured it out after a while and its speed bounced back from double-digit bytes to the original double-digit kilobytes!

I like the swarm visualisation! It shows how your peers are connected to you. It shows how complete you are, how complete they are, whether you are connected right now, which way the packets are flowing (to you or away from you) and how fast. What I like best about Azureus all along, apart from that it runs on Java, is that its UI is simply the most informative! Not that I do much with the info, it just tempts me to keep staring at it while it downloads, and I do not perceive that I have been able to help it download any faster by my staring, but it's fascinating. Much more fascinating that watching paint dry, and not much more useful, really. But, hey, it's fascinating.

The distributed database and distributed tracking sound promising, though I have to wait for a tracker to die before I will know how well it works. Will it be transparent to me when the distributed tracker takes over? Will we finally be able to search for torrents and share files without referring to a tracker running on a known URL, such as bitcomet.com? Then we will finally be able immune from such attacks as the death of suprnova.

Of course, if you are already using Azureus, you would probably have been prompted to change already. If you are using some other BT client, give Azureus a try. I have tried BitComet, ABC, Shareza, Burst, and all fall short of the control and visualisation that Azureus can give me. It runs a lot more efficiently on JDK1.5 and hopefully resource usage is no and issue for me. It seems more stable on JDK1.5, less freezing while it garbage collects. Should have made the switch moons ago.