Windows Vista P2P Compatibility Tests

poster by Julian @ FileSharingBlog.com

As a professional computer programmer I get access to certain resources before most others. In this case it would be Microsoft™ Windows™ Vista™ aka “Longhorn”. Vista™ Beta 1 was released yesterday to MSDN subscribers in the form of a 2.42 GB iso image. I started downloading around 2PM EST, started installing by 6PM, poked around and got comfortable with it till about 8PM then started a series of tests that lasted a total of 4 hours, until 12:00PM EST. What were these tests I was going to perform? Well I wanted to see; as a computer programmer, how various P2P applications held up on this new operating system. I picked by network as well as the programming language they were written in. In my 7 tests I have covered the following P2P networks:Gnutella, OpenFT, Ares, Edonkey2k/Overnet, eXeem, BitTorrent, and FastTrack(well not really, see results) and the following programming languages/runtimes: Java, C, C++, Delphi, Python, QT/C++, Visual Basic, Boost libraries and MFC/C++. In the end I am exhausted but this experiment was well worth the knowledge of what Vista™ has to offer. The following are the results in no particular order. I have listed the programming language, installation notes, top speed seen in KB/s, any runtime issues experienced and the pros and cons of the entire test for that client.

LimeWire:
• Programming Language: Java
• Installation Notes: Installer had to download and install the java runtime.
• Top speed seen: 478 KB/s

• Runtime Issues: 2/4 Downloads were corrupt.
• Pros: Network speeds were blazing.
• Cons: 1/2 of all files ended up corrupt.

KCEASY:
• Programming Language: Daemon – C, GUI – C++
• Installation Notes: Configuration Wizard was not graphically sound, missing elements.

• Top speed seen:: 232 KB/s (OpenFT)
• Runtime Issues: Contextual menus not graphically sound. General GUI flakiness.
• Pros: Network performance was good.
• Cons: Major GUI prblems in certain areas, mainly menus

BitTorrent (Official/Mainline):
• Programming Language: Python

• Installation Notes: Almost Transparent
• Top speed seen: 121 KB/s (while in END GAME mode)
• Runtime Issues: Network performance was very poor. Crashed on exit.
• Pros: GUI Performance was good.
• Cons: Network performance was fair at best.

Ares:

• Programming Language: Delphi
• Installation Notes: Smooth
• Top speed seen: 103 KB/s
• Runtime Issues: Contextual menus were flaky. Network would drop and reconnect. Searches stopped responding.
• Pros: Worked well for first few minutes.
• Cons: As time passed performance degraded to nothing. Application was useless after 15 mins as the network stack stopped responding.

EDonkey:
• Programming Language: Cross Platform – QT/C++
• Installation Notes: Smooth
• Top speed seen: 11 KB/s
• Runtime Issues: Out of 83 connections, 80 never reported a queue place. Overnet never bootstrapped.
• Pros: GUI performance was excellent.

• Cons: The network implementation didn’t like Vista™ at all.

eXeem:
• Programming Language: Core – Cross Platform C++(Boost), GUI Visual Basic
• Installation Notes: Smooth
• Top speed seen: 190 KB/s
• Runtime Issues: Substantial amount of GUI problems. Values in columns were never correct, size columns reported Terabytes and Petabytes for small files, Downloaders columns reported more(5x) users than the online users. Statistics stated: Users – 5,722 Files – 177,371 Shared -1.46PB.

• Pros: Transfer speed was decent when the transfers finally warmed up.
• Cons: GUI information was a mess, no logical data to go by as far as number of sources, or file sizes. Statistics were obviously being parsed wrong. Actually there seems to be a problem with the parser used in the entire application for math to string operations.

KaZaA (Official):
• Programming Language: MFC/C++
• Installation Notes: “The Kazaa application is not supported on Unknown Operating System. The installer will now quit.”
• Top speed seen: N/A

• Runtime Issues: N/A
• Pros: N/A
• Cons: N/A

*Note: These tests were all performed with the Windows™ firewall turned off and under a normal wireless NATed 10Mbit internet connection via Cable. Each software was uninstalled before moving on to the next tests.

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