In my personal tests, uTorrent running in Crossover on my Mac gets about 25%-50% higher transfer speeds than Transmission, and connects to peers faster.

I just tried it myself and uTorrent does give me better transfer speeds than Transmission (~80kb/s vs. ~60kb/s). It's not much and I tend to like Transmission more because it's Open Source but I wonder why there is such a difference.

I concur with your experience.

Hm. A sample size of one.

What did you expect, a double blind test published in a peer reviewed journal?

It reminds me:

the phrase direct observation sounds so much better than anecdotal evidence. </quote> http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=283746

DHT support is a huge reason, plus µTorrent's bandwidth-maximising logic is the best available. It makes a massive difference on large public trackers that are highly overloaded and unresponsive. You'll start downloading a lot quicker, and use much more bandwidth; because you can find more peers quicker, and make much better use of them.

The best implementations available are µTorrent, rTorrent, and Azureus, all with different strong suits. I exclusively use rTorrent in GNU Screen, but I don't download much from large public trackers.

µTorrent on Windows was leaps and bounds faster than other Windows clients (at least it was a couple years ago when I tested them). I'm not sure if the same is true for the Mac version, but if so I'm looking forward to switching to µTorrent.

For speed, you can run rtorrent which is just a command line client. It also has a lot of nice options which may not be available in a gui.

http://libtorrent.rakshasa.no/rtorrent/rtorrent.1.html

http://rtorrent.darwinports.com/

uTorrent is using 1% cpu and 14MB ram here on my MBP. rTorrent is using about the same on my server.

I'm so glad I found rtorrent. I had just started learning my way around (n)curses to implement basically the same client interface, in python.

Instead, I'm looking at rtorrent's implementation, in my free time, and working on other things. Saved myself a lot of time trying to do something I probably would have done rather poorly.

I absolutely love rtorrent, I've used it for 3 years! I occasionally see crashes in extremely long-lived processes, but I've had it run for 6months+ with a week+ of CPU time used.

In fact the fastest HTTP/BT/ed2k download agent on this planet is Thunder(aka Gigaget), which is built on a hybrid P2SP network. Someone may consider it leeching, though.

To me, a big plus is UI. I just love µTorrent UI. If you have few torrents in Transmission, the window gets huge. µTorrent's window doesn't grow as Transmission's.

Err, you can disable the auto grow setting in transmission if that's what you are talking about?..

uTorrent has awesome RSS functionality built in. I seem to remember Transmission's being nonexistent. Plus I just generally liked the UI much better. I had both running side by side at one point.

I prefer Transmission's UI for 1, 2 or 3 torrents, but any more than that and the window becomes cluttered. uTorrent is unparalleled in number-of-torrents to memory-footprint ratio (at least, in Windows).

Does transmission let you prioritize files within torrents? I don't remember it doing that, and I love that feature in uTorrent.

Yes it does

Well, doesn't look like this mac release has any RSS functionality at all.

How does RSS help torrents?

I download all of the TV I watch that way. Tvrss.net is great.

I would imagine that one could use the RSS feed directly from utorrent either to automatically download torrents, or to choose torrents to download based on the incoming feed.

Yep.

Very interesting; thanks for the thoughts, everyone. I will check out the Mac version.