µTorrent 1.5 released

[Firon]

rseiler: FINISHED pieces write out immediately. (as in the entire piece, incomplete pieces stay in RAM). Remember that a piece is a larger chunk, and many pieces are downloading at once. It works very well, even at 100mbit. I'm downloading at 500 KB/s and I get less than 1 write to disk per second.

Leave all the options at default, unless you're obsessed about using hundreds of MB of RAM. And the automatic increase is off because it can use a lot more memory if you were to thrash (disk overloaded), instead of just throttling down the speeds for it to catch up.

[Ultima]

@Adrenalin_: There's a difference between a public release and a leak. Fine, it's all over the 'net, it's available from a public IRC channel, and it's hosted at a publically accessible location, but does that mean it's officially released as a public beta? Unless it's officially announced on the administrators' own volition, it's not public, and the fact that it's widespread doesn't make it a reason to officially announce it. HL2 wasn't released when the source got leaked ;P

[IDoSI]

Whaaat? I like programs which I understand most options, and then there is a section of things which I don't understand and can leave the default options on the main time.

µTorrent was like that, but that Disk Cache section has gotten me all confused =/

This should be visible only in the Advanced section, or maybe by activating a trigger of "Show advanced options".

Or at least an explanation of its options, because I don't understand a thing about these Disk Cache's thingys

[Firon]

You shouldn't need to screw with it, actually. The defaults are designed to work up to at least 100mbit.

I'm going to update the FAQ explaining all the new stuff whenever there's a beta posted to the download page.

[IDoSI]

Yea, I know that, but it's so out in the open that I feel that I could be missing something performance-wise if I don't edit the settings properly, you know what I mean?

[Nefarious]

agreed, i totally took a look to see what I had to change and then i figured out i didnt need to do such a thing

just like Interface comes from Appearance, Disk Cache should be under Advanced Options

after all like u said, the default works just great

[rseiler]

IDoSI, regarding the meaning behind settings, uTorrent could dearly benefit from tooltip help. Hover the mouse over any user-configurable field in Options (starting with the uber-ambigious-without-referencing-the-Web-site-which-few-people-will-do Advanced Options) and up pops a simple line or two in the form of a tooltip describing what the heck it is. I've seen lots of freeware/shareware programs do that and it's great. Of course, having full-bodied, context-sensitive help would be nice too, but sometimes these thumbnail descriptions are enough -- and it's a lot easier than developing a Help file.

[Tene]

I apologise if this isn't the right thread, but I presumed the feature request forum was for final (or public beta) requests.

Could the download progress bars match the current uxtheme (XP Style) progress bars please? Windows Classic style solid blue is darned ugly.

[IDoSI]

Very correct rseiler, that would be enough for me already, good idea

[ManiusNG]

Hi

I don't know where to post it, so I just put it in this thread

Just a small question, why the network status popup ("baloon" over green/orange circle) does not look like a standard windows popup? I mean it's different - different borders and so on. Is it a custom drawing routine? If yes, why not to use windows built-in one?

[nightshifted]

Manius, you mean you can see it? I've seen it only once, and never again since. Apparently there are other users who rarely or never can get a tooltip from the connectibility indicator.

[ManiusNG]

Manius, you mean you can see it? I've seen it only once, and never again since. Apparently there are other users who rarely or never can get a tooltip from the connectibility indicator.

Yes, of course I can see it. It shows up every time I put mousepointer over it.

[rseiler]

Hi

I don't know where to post it, so I just put it in this thread

Just a small question, why the network status popup ("baloon" over green/orange circle) does not look like a standard windows popup? I mean it's different - different borders and so on. Is it a custom drawing routine? If yes, why not to use windows built-in one?

That's standard tooltip-type balloon help common in many programs. That's what I was talking about just above relative to introducing some explanatory notes into the program in other areas.

[ManiusNG]

Standard tooltip, yes. But it doesn't look standard. Take a look on any other windows utility which uses tooltips (shouldn't be hard to find one;) and compare them.

[rseiler]

For the manual cache size setting, does the figure represent what's shared between read/write, or is that amount given to each?

Answering my own question here, according to Disk Statistics, the manual cache size override size pertains to the write cache, effectively setting its upper limit. The read cache is totally dynamic and separate from that figure. As far as I've seen in moderate usage (several hundred KB/s down, 10-30KB/s up), the read cache tends to stay low at around 2-5MB while the write cache can vary between 5-12MB.

Which reminds me, one cool thing to see in Disk Statistics would be a straight percentage for read and write caching. It's nice to see everything broken down, too, but it requires a bit of mental gymnastics to make sense of.

[rseiler]

That's standard tooltip-type balloon help common in many programs. That's what I was talking about just above relative to introducing some explanatory notes into the program in other areas.

Standard tooltip' date=' yes. But it doesn't look standard. Take a look on any other windows utility which uses tooltips (shouldn't be hard to find one;) and compare them.[/quote']

But how? It's black text on a little yellow window, just like the one you see when you float over the uTorrent icon on the sys tray, right? Just like the one with every other program on my tray as well.

[ManiusNG]

But how? It's black text on a little yellow window, just like the one you see when you float over the uTorrent icon on the sys tray, right? Just like the one with every other program on my tray as well.

Borders my friend, borders. It has different borders. All other tooltips have black borders with shadow, the uTorrent's one drops no shadow and borders aren't black. Just a small, but noticable difference. I'll post a screenshot in a morning if needed.

[rseiler]

I see what you mean, but I wouldn't have noticed it if you hadn't mentioned it. I did notice that it takes longer to appear than your normal tooltip, but that's probably intentional, since that particular item is one you don't want popping up every time you swing the mouse by. As you said, perhaps they're not using the standard routine for some reason.

[anoxan]

this may have been said, but I'm experiencing a minor bug in build 458, and thought I'd post here, since I'm too lazy to install irc atm.

that said, the network status icon stays red for me. I'm pretty sure it's a glitch, since I'm still uploading at 35kb/s, and downloading at 130kb/s.

[canuckerfan]

somethings that I noticed with build 458:

upon restarting utorrent, the speed graph chosen is not remembered, instead it reverts back to upload and download.

the preferences window still does not remember which subcategory was last selected before closing it.

[Firon]

anoxan: no, it means it couldn't bind the listening port. Probably your firewall.

[wormhole]

somethings that I noticed with build 458:

upon restarting utorrent, the speed graph chosen is not remembered, instead it reverts back to upload and download.

that and the refresh resolution is set back to 5 seconds.

[Kazuaki Shimazaki]

I just managed to find out about 458, and wonder why Ludde is so shy about putting it on - it works perfectly. Yeah, I'm sure it doesn't work perfectly for someone, but I don't exactly see a lot of screaming, and really it isn't like the official releases work for everyone anyway (a long line of complaints in Troubleshooting and Found Bugs testify to this).

The new disk cache works like a charm, though the AI might need some work. I had to manually disable the write cache and force the read cache to activate. Apparently, the fact I was Pure Seeding didn't impress the AI. The disk cache took just under TWO MB and seems to vary between 60-100% effective with an average of around 80% (preliminary estimate with some tendency to improve over time). I don't know exactly how harmful all the disk reads are, but if I can eliminate 80% of disk action with a measly TWO megs of RAM, I'd pay it. IIRC, BC's cache claims around that efficiency, and it requires at least 6MB, escalating to 50...

Good work, Ludde!

[Firon]

The read cache is turned off by default for low upload speeds. TO make it turn on with low upload speeds (under 100 KiB/s), turn off "turn off read cache when upload speed is low".

And I'm rather curious how you got efficiency, since there is none stated. You also seem to forget the fact that turning on the read cache makes it read-ahead, and with only a few MB of RAM, you will actually be reading a lot MORE (in terms of amount of data) from the disk, instead of less. Much larger reads, and most of it gets discarded. You're making it worse.

To put it simply, leave it at the defaults. These options are really for people who have multi-megabyte/s connections.

[Kazuaki Shimazaki]

I'm estimating it off the Rate readings. If it is reading five times/second off the cache and only one time off the disk, then presumably the other five times it drew from data already in the cache, so it must have guessed correctly and saved my drive heads from having to maneuver.

Or am I reading this wrong?

In terms of total data read, I may be losing or I may be winning if everyone just wants similar data, but I would have thought the concerns over disk wear would be over the number of times the heads have to maneuver. If they are doing a few big reads rather than many little reads, in principle I should be ahead in terms of disk wear.

Or am I getting this thing wrong.

For now, I think I'd force it to activate for a bit longer so I can actually get some experimental data... since I'm going to bed, I'd force the read cache up to 32MB (no worries over RAM or resource consumption now...) manually and see how it does tonight.

APPEND: I think I'd stop the experiment. Yes, I know I said the above only 10 minutes earlier, but I just realized from reading the Task Manager display that pretty much the entire cache went onto virtual memory (i.e. my hard drive). In fact, I think I'd stop using caches - what's the point when the program reads from my HDD and just copies it over to the VM part of my HD?