Which Bittorrent client should I use with Torrentflux?
This is a really great question, and it has a fairly simple answer.
You should use Transmission whenever possible.
We have three clients installed on all the seedboxes for you to choose from: Transmission, BitTornado, and Mainline (the original bittorrent client). Azureus is not installed on our seedboxes. Transmission uses the least amount of memory of all the Torrentflux clients. When less memory is used by your Bittorrent client, more memory is available for your seedbox to do other things – like downloading and seeding more torrents.
Transmission uses much, much less memory than Mainline or BitTornado. That is why your default client is set to Transmission when you get your new seedbox. If you do choose to run BitTornado or Mainline, you should expect to run less than five torrents at a time, because your memory will be used up very quickly, and your seedbox is likely to lock up and become unresponsive.
Transmission, on the other hand, uses memory much more efficiently.
Whatever your choice in this area, it would be very wise for you to keep an eye your seedbox memory statistics. If your seedbox starts to use more than a handful of megabytes of swap space, your server will quickly become unable to seed at high speeds because it is using virtual memory (saved on the hard disk); its actual physical memory (ram) has run out. Your seedbox will begin working very hard to function at 100%, and it will fail to do so. Your server will not be able to get the information from the hard disk to the network card fast enough and you will be unable to take advantage of the fact that your seedbox is on a 100mbit connection. This is called “thrashing” and Wikipedia has a fairly detailed explanation if you are interested in more info on this.
Bottom line: use Transmission if possible.
The exception becomes apparent when you do not want to download an entire torrent, but just some individual files from the torrent. For example, if you ran into a torrent that featured the five most recent versions of a Linux operating system, but you only wanted the most recent one and not the other four, you should use Bittornado. Transmission doesn’t (yet) allow you to partially download a torrent, but Bittornado does. This is when you should use Tornado… but in all other instances, use Transmission.
Try it. You’ll like it. Leave your thoughts in the comments – we think you’ll find that your seedbox performs at its best with Transmission.
As always, have fun.
//Seedbox Hosting Team//
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So, if I wanted to seed many torrents for archival purposes with 3 peers each, how many torrents can I expect to run on Transsmission without using swap versus Bittornado? Does more peer connections take up memory? If I only had two peers per torrent, could I seed even more torrents?
Great question. We have observed that on one of our seedbox servers with 150 megs of ram, each Transmission instance starts out using about 2% of the memory. 3% with a few peers, 4% with 5 or 6 peers, 5% with 12 peers and so on. You should be able to run 10 or 20 Transmission torrents without breaking a sweat. We have seen people successfully run 40 or more torrents - especially if they are just for archival purposes without many peers.
On the other hand a single instance of BitTornado with a bunch of peers can quickly chew up 35% or 45% of the memory.
So yes, with Transmission, you can seed a lot of torrents, and you can seed even more if they have less peers.
In TorrentFlux, I’ve noticed that when switching between BT clients, I’m able to select/change the number of ‘Max Upload Connections’ for a torrent on-the-fly when using the BitTornado client. I once thought this was the best client to optimize TF; to manage specific torrents with high/low peer counts, but it has an adverse effect on the seedbox.
Now, after much experimentation, I realize it’s best to use Transmission, but manage the ‘Max Connections / Max. Upload Connections’ through the Admin options in the seedbox. Server load is now great, even when seeding well over 20 torrents simultaneously.
To conclude, right you are, Admin - Transmission is by far the best client to use in TF. Thanks!!