TopBT on Vuze - A Topology-Aware BitTorrent Client

January 23, 2009 by sharky

In an article published back in October, we reported about a new technology for BitTorrent called TopBT. TopBT was originally built on LH-ABC, an open-source BitTorrent client - but it has been vastly improved into a new version of Vuze. Unlike most currently existing popular BitTorrent clients such as Vuze, BitTorrent™, and µTorrent, the unique feature of TopBT is, it actively discovers its network proximity to its connected peers. It does so through actively sending packets to those peers, and inspecting their responses. Besides the topology-awareness, TopBT also considers network transmission rates to its peers, so that it can download fast. Not only that, but TopBT also saves unnecessary BitTorrent traffic that clogs up the Internet, which is great for those who are bandwidth-capped by their ISP. But is TopBT faster than µTorrent? In our tests: Yes.

There are two main goals that TopBT aims to achieve. First, it wants to reduce its generated network traffic due to topology-unawareness. This is very important for Internet traffic saving, because BitTorrent traffic accounts for a very high percentage of the total Internet traffic, more than 40% as reported in an IPOQUE report in 2007. Second, it wants to maintain fast download time, a download time that can be comparable to the existing popular BitTorrent clients on average, if not faster than them.

TopBT is implemented based on open-source Vuze code base version 4.0.0.4. Our evaluation results from typical runs on Windows XP show that TopBT can achieve comparable download speed compared to the original Vuze and uTorrent, sometimes even faster. More importantly, it can save Internet traffic significantly…

TopBT Installation

TopBT is almost identical to Vuze in every way, except there’s no "Vuze View" - only the classic (Azureus) view is available. By default TopBT is started in "Advanced" mode, which is required in order to enable and modify TopBT settings.

1. Download TopBT here. It’s available as a Windows installer, or as a .jar file for Linux. Note that on Linux and Unix, you need "root" priviledge to run the TopBT jar file.

2. TopBT requires Nmap (includes WinPcap library) installed on your computer before you can use the recommended TCP Ping based unchoking mechanism. Nmap for Windows can be found here, while other versions can be found on their homepage. TopBT also requires Java (JRE).

Enabling TopBT Settings

Open TopBT (aka ‘Vuze’) and go to Tools > Options… You’ll see a tab on the left called TopBT - click it. The default is set to OFF - choose either "TopBT Ping" or "TopBT TCPPing" (try them both out). Be sure to click SAVE at the bottom.

 

NOTE: TopBT comes well-equipped with some decent default client settings; not much needs to be configured. However, you may want to use the "Configuration Wizard" in the Tools menu, to set up your ISP connection settings and port testing.

ALSO NOTE: TopBT uses a speed setting called "Auto-speed (beta)", which may report your UL/DL capabilities much lower than they actually are. We found that leaving this setting to (beta) works best, although you may need to manually change the Upload Limit and Download Limit on that page. Find it in Options > Transfer > Auto-Speed.

Viewing Your "Saved" Bandwidth

With TopBT running, double-click in the bottom-right corner where it says, "TopBT saved…". This will open up the client statistics. To view details about your ’saved’ data and protocol traffic, click on the "Traffic" tab:

Speed Tests: uTorrent vs. TopBT

We tested a variety of different popular torrents from Mininova’s "Featured" torrents, and in at least 70% of the trials, TopBT took the top spot for download speed (by finishing the torrents first). Both clients were configured comparably (DHT = ON; UL limit = 100 KB/s; DL limit 500 KB/s; with similar per-torrent and global connection settings), and identical torrents were added to both clients simultaneously.

For anyone looking to increase their download speed on public trackers, and save some bandwidth in the process, TopBT is a BitTorrent client that we highly recommend. But don’t take our word for it: try it; you’ll see.

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