We ran TopBT on a Windows XP machine and test its CPU and memory usage. The machine has Pentium M 1.8GHZ CPU and 1.5GB memory. Our run shows that TopBT consumes moderate amount of CPU cycles and memory, except that in the beginning the CPU and memory usage is a little higher.
Nmap running in the background when there are new peers need to be measured
CPU usage increased due to periodical nmap running
By running the programs of TopBT with TCP Ping, and original Vuze (TopBT turns off) side by side on two Windows machines, we can observe that, the download speed is comparable (a bit faster) with the original Vuze.
TopBT (on top) saves Internet traffic while the download speed can be faster than Vuze (on bottom)
Under the hood: TopBT did find a nearby fast leecher to download from
We first set the transfer parameters of TopBT and µTorrent to the same, and then run the experiments side by side on two Windows machines. And it is important to add javaw.exe to Windows Firewall Exceptions list, so that TopBT can receive incoming connections as well. As we observe, the download speed of TopBT is also comparable (a bit faster) with µTorrent while TopBT can save induced Internet traffic.
As a TopBT user, you have to make sure that TopBT software is not firewalled, so that you can achieve a fast download speed and do a fair comparison to uTorrent and other BitTorrent clients. Otherwise, you might get a low download speed.
TopBT on Vuze v.s. µTorrent
µTorrent Bandwidth setting
TopBT on Vuze Transfer setting
Windows Firewall setting for javaw.exe
TopBT can easily save hundreads of Mega bytes of traffic for a downloading file with size around 1 GB. The figure below shows that for a 790MB file, TopBT saved 4 GB traffic, as shown in the red circle at the bottom right corner.
TopBT on Vuze saved traffic