Found on alt.bittorrent

[Pyewacket]

Some BitComet user found her fave client banned from her fave tracker and asked for an alternative. Many suggestions, among them µTorrent. Her response:

"Thanks for all the suggestions, folks. Will give them a try.

utorrent's out, however, as apparently it's much harder on HDDs as it

doesn't have a read-write cache..."

Frankly, I don't understand exactly what she means (nor is it important to me) but is this in fact a µTorrent shortcoming?

[Firon]

I don't think she understands it either.

µTorrent has a write cache. The size is automatically determined by µTorrent by default (though you can set it manually, diskio.write_queue_size). There's no internal read cache because its essentially useless with torrents. It uses the Windows system cache (which all programs use technically, it's on a system level) for reads. Said system cache does read-aheads and caches a whole lot of read data. Various other developers from other programs agreed with this.

[Pyewacket]

Thanks, Firon. I'll pass it along (with the disclaimer that I don't know what the hell it means).

[deeppal]

U see Firon thats where I disagree always with u.

How can u compare bittorent traffic, when pple sometimes download at bombastic speeds and multiple torrents, to programs that windows uses? Of course the bittorent traffic is gonna be harder on the hdisk than day to day normal programs. We all know it fragments the hdisk more than other clients with disk cache. Yes we can use a disk defrag every few days but try leaving utorrent running at breaking speeds on a PC for a week and see how ur hdisk slows down.

We can see the fragmentation but the damage on hdisk wont be seen till much later. Dont get me wrong, I have been using utorrent from day 1, and I understand the need of devs to promote their products and not talk abt its weaknesses.

Pls dont compare disk cache to disk write and then go on to say that windows cache is designed for bittorent traffic. If only bill gates knew abt bittorent when he made windows, that wd have been fun.

[Firon]

And again you're wrong, µTorrent allocates in a way that causes the least fragmentation possible. Disk cache has absolutely NOTHING to do with fragmentation.

And you didn't even read my damn post, I said µTorrent HAS a cache, for WRITES. It is utterly useless to have a -read cache- on top of the Windows system cache, which does precisely what a read cache would do: cache reads, and perform read-aheads!

[1c3d0g]

If I may: how can we tweak Windows' cache? Or is this unmoddable? :|

[Firon]

There's various programs to control it. Google is your friend?

I think Sysinternals has something for it...

[1c3d0g]

CacheSet looks like what you're referring to. What's a recommended value?

[deeppal]

And again you're wrong, µTorrent allocates in a way that causes the least fragmentation possible. Disk cache has absolutely NOTHING to do with fragmentation.

And you didn't even read my damn post, I said µTorrent HAS a cache, for WRITES. It is utterly useless to have a -read cache- on top of the Windows system cache, which does precisely what a read cache would do: cache reads, and perform read-aheads!

Merry Christmas!

Next time I will be back with results. Hehe instead of u and me going at loggerheads with just plain words.

[eisa01]

It would be cool to be able to load a file you're seeding completely in memory, if you have enough RAM and specify it. Great future for uploaders, or people only having one or a few torrents seeding.

[Firon]

RAM disk?

[eisa01]

Hm... I've only heard about Ram disks back on Mac OS 7.6, where you could choose to use a HD or removable storage as ram. But I guess RAM disk is what I'm asking for here then.

[DreadWingKnight]

Hm... I've only heard about Ram disks back on Mac OS 7.6, where you could choose to use a HD or removable storage as ram. But I guess RAM disk is what I'm asking for here then.

Using Hard drives or removable storage as ram is called swapfile.

Using RAM as a disk drive is a RAM disk

[Switeck]

Using Hard drives or removable storage as ram is called swapfile.

Using RAM as a disk drive is a RAM disk

And using ram as though it were an extension of the hard drive is a cache file.

Of course with windows, it tries to make almost all your ram into a cache file...then has to swap to hdd for anything very large.