Monsoon - a New, Fast and Friendly Bittorrent Client for Linux

One of the most popular ways of downloading content off the Internet these days is via a protocol known as bittorrent. Bittorrent is a swarm idea. One person starts with the whole item, but then instead of passing it onto the next person, who passes it onto the next person, etc., until everyone has it, bittorrent splits the file into hundreds or thousands of pieces, sending a few pieces to each person connected to the original host. In this way, those pieces can be shared among all the downloaders - by other downloaders - which takes pressure off the initial host, so that the host doesn't need to use up unhealthy amounts of bandwidth, not to mention speeding up the process for everyone.

I've tried a lot of different bittorrent clients, for Windows, Mac and Linux, and have found quite a few I liked. Among them are Transmission (my all-time favorite), Azureus, uTorrent and others. A few weeks ago, I was trying out the latest incarnation of OpenSUSE and noticed it was using a program I'd never heard of as its bittorrent client. That client was Monsoon.

I did a little checking up on Monsoon, tried it out, and all in all, like what I see. First, Monsoon prides itself on being lightweight. This is pretty important in a bittorrent client, as all the connections to a person's computer, not to mention the actual bandwidth spent uploading and downloading information, can take a toll, not only on any other network usage your computer might see, but in the overall speed and responsiveness of your computer itself. Monsoon, with its light footprint and low system usage, attempts to alleviate this.