Does utorrent slow down computer

Answer 1

Yes. It will slow down your computer a little bit while it's running but not much. It will however slow down the internet speeds to other computers in your house. So if you experience slow internet speeds then shut down utorrent (it will be a little green icon in the system tray of the computer that's running it) and see if things improve. It's usually a good idea to turn utorrent off if you're not downloading anything with it. utorrent will not slow down your computer or your internet if it's turned off.

Answer 2

I agree that it any torrent client can slow down the computer but it depends on a number of factors. First, how many torrents are you trying to download? Second, what type of CPU do you have in your machine? Third, where are you storing the downloaded files? Fourth, how much RAM do you have in your computer? Fifth, how long have you had the torrent client up and running for this session?

In my experience, I have found that on lesser computers such as those with Pentium 4, Core Duo, or Core 2 series or any AMD processors, trying to get more than a couple dozen torrents at a time bogs down the machine in a very big way, especially if each torrent is more than half a gigabyte or so in size. Limit the number of active torrents (and by this I mean the total of the torrents you are seeding as well as the ones that you are downloading) to about 20 or so and it should help improve your performance. When you get a more modern and better-performing processor such as anything in the Core i3, i5, or i7 series, you can start downloading more files at the same time again.

If the hard drive on which the files are being stored are cheaper or slower drives such as Western Digital, Samsung, HGST, Toshiba, or Fujitsu, then that can cause problems as well as the client software is trying to write out data at a faster rate than what the drive can handle and, therefore, the machine has to keep putting everything on hold while it tries to catch up. For this reason, I recommend highly using Seagate hard drives as they have larger caches and tend to have faster access speeds. They also are considerably more reliable.

Also, if you are trying to write the files to your C: drive, then that can bog performance as well since that is usually where your virtual memory swap file is as well (and is where the swap file will be if that is your only hard drive). I strongly suggest getting a second hard drive (whether it be internal in the case of a desktop computer or the rare laptop that has a second hard drive bay) or an external hard drive or Network-Attached Storage (NAS) device. This will keep Windows happier since it will still be able to access the swap file without interruption or delay and you will still be able to get the files in a timely fashion.

If the computer is skimpy on RAM (say 4 gigabytes or so), then definitely consider getting more memory if the machine can take it. With Windows 7 (and especially with Windows 8), I recommend no less than 8GB if you are going to run a torrent client. While the client itself doesn't demand much RAM typically, it makes things easier while the received data is being queued up for writing out to the hard drive. It will also allow Windows to continue to skip along happy as can be since it does not need to make room by swapping things out to the virtual memory file which slows things down considerably.

The best performance that I have configured for a client has been a Core i7 4770K with 16GB of DDR3-1600 RAM and a 16TB NAS across a gigabit Ethernet network. The NAS is set up with two gigabit channels bonded together to give 2Gbps of bandwidth. The primary switch in the network is configured to give secondary communication priority to the NAS (as it is used as the central file repository) with the only top priority function being the VoIP services the business requires. All other traffic (such as Internet access, print jobs, etc.) is given third or fourth priority as appropriate. All communication is divided into half a dozen VLANs so as to keep broadcast traffic at a minimum. The links between the primary switch (a managed Layer 3 switch) and the subordinate switches are, just like with the NAS, bonded pairs of gigabit channels. All workstations have only single gigabit links. The throughput we get with this network is 800Mbps as compared to 130Mbps prior to this configuration. This allows the torrent client to operate very cleanly and with no delay or slowing down of the computer.

The point of the last paragraph is that if you set things up correctly, your torrent client doesn't have to be a burden to your computer at all. It only matters how everything is configured and what resources you make available to it.