First off - excluding the "what version" and "what torrent" false trail, I can confirm that KT is a great deal slower than other clients. How do I know? Experience. Is it because I haven't allowed this or that port? No. I can RTFM *and* port forward a router. This is an *overall experience* type observation and I simply refuse to be side tracked with versions, ports, O/S etc. The fact that I can configure other clients to work as expected and the fact that I am not alone points the finger most firmly at the developers (no insult intended - but next time try listening!)

Put simply - I switched from KT to Az and my downloads dropped from DAYS to hours. I am not alone. I am sure that the same would have held true if I installed any other client. So - version is irrelevant, port/firewall configuration is irrelevant (after all I can get it to work right). Perhaps it is a case of other clients cheating and not following either the spirit or the letter of P2P protocols. If so - say so. But I've been reading the forums since way back when and they all say the same KT IS SLOW.

Could I write a single line of code?
Yes
Could I write an app?
Yes
Could I write something like KT?
No
Can I be bothered to read the source to try and find the problem and fix it?
No

But - when so many people are **** about the same thing (speed) try admitting that your little baby ain't all that perfect. Try to find out why so many users are that dissatisfied. Then perhaps you will be a man. And a true developer.

Perhaps the latest version fixes all this.

For the moment I have uninstalled and returned to Az.
Why? Because it works better (hours instead of days for a download).

Joe

I'm the first person to admit that KT isn't perfect, and we have had problems with speeds in the past, but these are now fixed.

So if you can't be bothered to try out the latest version, please stay away, rants like this are really not constructive at all, and are a big waste of time.

Hmmm, i think it was from version 2.1 that my friend Paul complained several times why i downloaded faster compared to his utorrent. That while he was uploading faster to the same swarm.

Just test the client on private torrents versus private torrents, seeing azureus has a huge DHT database online, it might make them faster on normal torrents.

I have no speed issues.

Yes, there were many a long time ago, but now there are no problems..

In my experience ktorrent is faster than azureus.

Currently Azureus is still faster when webseed is enabled, but webseed in azureus will only be enabled when there is less then 1.0 distributed copy in swarm.

When using a private tracker, uTorrent was the fastest client I had used, even while emulated through Wine and my max download speed was 2.4 Mb/s, but with kTorrent this jumped to 2.8 Mb/s.

In general this was also MY general overview and experience of kTorrent and I have the same background as the OP.

George wrote:I'm the first person to admit that KT isn't perfect, and we have had problems with speeds in the past, but these are now fixed.

So if you can't be bothered to try out the latest version, please stay away, rants like this are really not constructive at all, and are a big waste of time.

I agree -- we don't ask you what version you run and to try the latest because we like to torment or insult you. there have been legitimate speed issues with previous versions of KTorrent that were fixed in later versions.

Rants like this are next to useless for developers and community members who want to debug ktorrent. If there is clear evidence that KTorrent is not doing as well as another torrent client, a lot of us here would be more than happy to investigate it.

I've done a lot of personal testing with KTorrent versus the popular clients out there, and for the latest release I've found performance to be very comparable.

Sitting around, claiming KT is slow and then saying you can't be bothered to elaborate or investigate is just wasting all of our time. We don't pretend that KTorrent is perfect and flawless, but you need to provide us with more information that helps us pinpoint problems.

First off - it was in no way a rant. It was a comment. Take a deep breath and note the difference.
Secondly - Being an ex MS junkie I patch to the latest versions (avoiding any unstable pool like the plague) on a regular basis. So - I run the latest 'approved' versions of just about everything.
Lastly - because things were running slowly I did the decent thing and googled 'torrent' 'hints', 'speed', 'slow' etc. All I read was the standard developer 'try opening this port', or 'are you sure your firewall is configured right'. The point I was making is that compared to the other p2p clients, ktorrent is (was?) very much slower than anything else.

One tip I did pick up on (and that worked) was to turn of DHT. The exact reason why this speeds up things is never explained anywhere - apart from 'try upgrading to the latest version'. Yet throughout the forum, the repeated refrain is "we can't reproduce it here". Why then are things 'fixed' in the new version?

The points I was trying to make is that
a) Ktorrent is slow vs the competition.
b) I (like I suspect all others who have tried to flag speed as an issue) know how to configure things. Equally there would be no basis for comparison unless KT was slow. Slow not as in 'its slow vs xyz, just slow. Check the forum and disagree if you want.
c)As to the developers' comments about not being bothered - please, please, please see above and initial comments. If x^y people say it's slow, retorting with 'it must be you, we can't reproduce it here' will result in a post saying 'hey, I don't want to get side tracked - it's slow'. Take criticism in all its shapes and forms. After all if KT is/was so perfect and has no issues that you can reproduce why release a new version?

In closing - I took the time to register and post some feedback. I also tried to frame my post in a way that wasn't a flame or insulting to the developers.

Finally I would be interested to see an in depth change log posted highlighting the differences in the latest version. Equally I would urge the developers to do a forum search on 'slow' or 'speed' and decide for themselves if, with hindsight, perhaps a slightly differant response would have been posted.

I understand a lot of people seem to have this problem, but a lot of people don't. How can you expect the developers to fix something when they have no idea what is causing it?

On my Slackware 12 laptop, I am constantly maxing out my speeds (3Mb line). And this is without me having access to the router to forward ports or setup upnp. I am almost wondering if this is something caused by the way the OS developers do things. Not on purpose but something they do that conflicts with ktorrent. I am not a developer so I can't speak too much on that.

But if you go on utorrents forums, or azureus's you will notice speed issues on all those. This isn't something that only ktorrent is plagued with. Every bittorrent client out has probably had complaints on speed. In my personal experience ktorrent is just as fast as azureus and I don't lose all the resources normally taken up with java.

I am not trying to bash anyone here, because I have been on the "xxx client is too slow" side, but I am just trying to let people know that this is something that the ktorrent developers take seriously, but they can only do so much when they can't reproduce it on their ends.

Jeremy

I have to confess that I never had speed issues with ktorrent.

Ports open, DHT enabeled and it often max out my downloadspeed.

Therefore I can't agree to the statement that ktorrent is ALWAYS slower than any other client.

(Beside the fact, what is faster than maxing out the downloadline? A courie will ring on your door and give your the file on a DVD?)

From my experience with KT v. 2.2.2, it is actually faster than any other bittorrent client I've tried. I had used Azureus a great deal and liked (still do) its constant speeds, but KT gives me much higher top DL speed.

Not here to flame in any way, just my personal experiences.

I live on a college campus (in Canada) and have access to an insanely fast network with little administration. Because of this I can torrent to my hearts content. I have tried nearly all linux torrent clients, but non of them can compare in speed to Ktorrent. My client of choice is deluge, since i'm running gnome, but I still use Ktorrent as it is the best seeding + downloading client in one IMO. Here's a screenshot to ponder over, it's a very typical torrenting day for myself, and i have given azureus, deluge, tramsmission, etc the same comparison downloading the exact same heavily seeded files on PRIVATE trackers:

http://picasaweb.google.com/mgbdeftones ... 7981238034
http://picasaweb.google.com/mgbdeftones ... 6781186866
http://picasaweb.google.com/mgbdeftones ... 3896284962
http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1066/532 ... b6b4_b.jpg

Ktorrent will max out on my network at 7 MB/sec uploading and downloading, and it does so extremely quick (as in how fast it connects to seeds/peers), not sure how it's "slow", but to each their own.

bassmadrigal wrote:[...]
On my Slackware 12 laptop, I am constantly maxing out my speeds (3Mb line). And this is without me having access to the router to forward ports or setup upnp. I am almost wondering if this is something caused by the way the OS developers do things. Not on purpose but something they do that conflicts with ktorrent. I am not a developer so I can't speak too much on that.
[...]

Uhm, since it obviously doesn't have anything to do with the OS (I easily max out my rather large pipe, and I'm on Kubuntu), the desktop (see above, they guy who's running gnome), or the client (Azureus also has complaints, as you say yourself), couldn't it maybe have to do with, uhm, different torrents with different peers?
If you're downloading something whos only seeds are on dialup, you're obviously not going to get the same speed as for example OpenSuSE's torrents who are seeded by some servers in Germany.

Also, one should remember it takes some time for KTorrent (or any client for that matter) to connect to all the peers and initialize, so it might take ~5-15 minutes for it to gain speed.

guffen

I have to concur that ktorrent is slow. I watched while i got downloads of .5 kBytes/second with long periods of nothing yet my network card continued to flash - so I turned on a network trace ... what did I see - ktorrent repeatedly authenticating and exchanging acknowledgments with peers with no data being transferred. Request the same torrent using utorrent on a Win XP system ... it's been downloading between 50-115kBytes per second continually.

Guffen wrote:

bassmadrigal wrote:[...]
On my Slackware 12 laptop, I am constantly maxing out my speeds (3Mb line). And this is without me having access to the router to forward ports or setup upnp. I am almost wondering if this is something caused by the way the OS developers do things. Not on purpose but something they do that conflicts with ktorrent. I am not a developer so I can't speak too much on that.
[...]

Uhm, since it obviously doesn't have anything to do with the OS (I easily max out my rather large pipe, and I'm on Kubuntu), the desktop (see above, they guy who's running gnome), or the client (Azureus also has complaints, as you say yourself), couldn't it maybe have to do with, uhm, different torrents with different peers?
If you're downloading something whos only seeds are on dialup, you're obviously not going to get the same speed as for example OpenSuSE's torrents who are seeded by some servers in Germany.

Also, one should remember it takes some time for KTorrent (or any client for that matter) to connect to all the peers and initialize, so it might take ~5-15 minutes for it to gain speed.

guffen

I don't know if this was to slam me or agree with me...

I do agree partially with you. There are definitely torrents which do not have great seeds, so the torrents are going to be slow, but people have been arguing that ktorrent is slow when downloading well seeded torrents.

The big thing I was trying to get at is there is no easy way for the developers to fix the problem when they can't reproduce it.

@rp6578 What version are you using?? And you may want to consider starting your own thread, so we don't hijack this one.