uTorrent Download Accelerator

How do you test if a download accelerator is really working? One way would be to download the same files twice. Once with the download accelerator enabled and once without. While this is surely not the most scientific method of testing it should provide enough data to come to a conclusion. The uTorrent Download Accelerator was mentioned on Madhur Kapoor’s Blog. It promises accelerated downloads thanks to a powerful traffic optimization algorithm that is working in the background.

The developer’s website does not really go into much detail about the optimization but it is safe to say that the uTorrent preferences are not changed by it. There is also information about a paid version upon which is said to improve the performance even more. Again without additional information on what is being optimized.

The test was conducted with two downloads of 201 and 34 Megabytes. The unaccelerated download reached an average download speed of 756.5 and 203.2 Megabytes while the accelerated download capped in at 654.2 and 142.8 Megabytes. The acceleration of the downloads had the opposite effect. It could be that the test system was already optimized way better than the software could do it or it could be attributed to different download sources. The last possibility would be that the software is not working as advertised.

It the uTorrent download accelerator working? Apparently not on the test system. It could be worth a try if you have abysmal download rates in the bittorrent client. What’s your take after trying the software?