The UTorrent dev team released 3.4 version of the client with a promise that it would change the way uTorrent chooses peers and therefore improves the download speeds and preventing DDOS attacks.
Other than the bug fixes and new features, BitTorrent's Adam Kelly explained how the new system works. He said,"If a BitTorrent client chooses poorly, or if there are malicious actors in the swarm, the connections between clients are not well distributed through the swarm, leading to a large number of hops from node to node. That slows down the ability to each client to pass data on to the next."
This method is called as 'Canonical Peer Priority'. The new peer selection method will now start giving more priority to those peers who are closer to you. When uTorrent received maximum number of connections for a torrent download, it will still accept incoming peers with a higher priority. It will accept a new peer by kicking out a low priority peer at the same time. This way it will help peers to get access to faster connections.
Also, the new peer selection method prevents DDoS attacks. BitTorrent's developer Arvid Norberg said,"There's an opportunity to DDoS a swarm by filling up everyone's connections slots, and continuously making incoming connections at such rate that peers won't have an opportunity to connect to anyone else."
The difference in speed boost will not be noticed right away as the effectiveness of the new client depends more on how many peers use uTorrent 3.4. As time passes and once a large enough userbase shifts to this client, these implementations should have a noticeable effect.
