14 DAY TRIAL // A joint study conducted by researchers at the University of California in Riverside, USA with help from the Telefonica Research company in Barcelona, Spain, has concluded that uTorrent provides 16% faster download speeds than its main competitor, Vuze.
The study was conducted in the month of August 2009 on more than 10 million BitTorrent users. A sample week was selected with representative results. The study included 30 of the most popular and used ISPs around the Globe.
The researchers employed a list of the 600 most popular torrent files from August 2009, found on The Pirate Bay tracker in the studied period. For each of the tracked torrent file, an equal number of users were selected, using Vuze or uTorrent as their desktop P2P client, downloading from the same ISP, and using similar platforms. After the huge campaign from Vuze claiming to be the best BitTorrent client, uTorrent came surprisingly on top.
In the big picture, uTorrent averaged download speeds up to 16% faster than its competitor. The results were even bigger on 10% of the ISPs, where download speed of uTorrent was up to 30% better. The only ISP where Vuze came tied with uTorrent was Verizon.
To understand why this happened, the researchers reverse-engineered both clients and determined that uTorrent had mechanisms and features superior to Vuze on how it discovers new peers, how it handles its peers and how and when to close connections.
A door was left open in the study for future researches on other BitTorrent clients. To be noted that the study only followed to detect which was the fastest client, not the best. “Even though in our study uTorrent appears to achieve faster speeds than Vuze, we do not claim that uTorrent is the way to go,” the study reveals.
“We hope that our preliminary findings will open the door for new research efforts to better understand the impact of design choices in the performance of real-world BT implementations. Ultimately, we see such research efforts leading to the design of better P2P systems,” the paper indicates.
The complete study can be found hosted on the TorrentFreak blog at this link.
