Thread: Rtorrent - File Chunk Storage Error (RAM?)

Hey guys, So I keep getting this message on my new 1Gbit EvoBoxes VPS:
File Chunk Storage error: [File chunk write error: Cannot allocate memory.]

I am downloading 4 torrents right now (all are red) in total these torrents come to 500GB
Also seeding 3 (all are green) - Total 50GB

I assumed this error was due to too much RAM being used but when I do "htop" I see ram usage is 831MB of 3.5GB (23%) So it can't be that?

Also I have a 100Mbit (dedi) EvoBoxes VPS with only 2GB ram and have never seen this error?



Lastly I will add that it only happened when I added a huge 400GB torrent.

Both rtorrents "Max Mem Usage" is default at 1600.

I have searched around but can't find anything useful as it doesn't seem that all the ram is being used up?

Any ideas?

I experienced this a few times, usually it is because there are too much torrents or the total file size of one torrent is too large.
Sometimes it might happen due to huge amount of announces in a short period of time.
But there are other possibilities, so it may vary.

You are running out of memory. This message usually means that there are a large number of active torrents. In your case it sounds like you have some torrents with large chunks that can't load into memory. This probably won't crash anything, but it is probably a performance hit. By running out of memory, I don't mean physical RAM but rather the amount of shared memory that has been allocated to the rTorrent process.

If your torrent chunks are large e.g. 1 MB+, you should either reduce upload slots (I don't think that you can directly limit transfer slots) or increase max_memory_usage until it's you have sufficient memory allocated to avoid the error. Also, the max memory setting refers to shared, not core memory, so max_memory_usage is not limited by the amount of physical memory.

.

I've seen this problem quite a bit on my seeders where I have RSS feeds of a dozen or more 0.5-4.5 gigabyte torrents all trying to start at once. I never did find a solution that worked for me. Tried adjusting memory limits, torrent chunk sizes, anything I could find, but it still kept on.

Thankfully it didn't completely stop the transfers either. A few of them would continue even after the others got blocked out for a refresh cycle. Eventually it all works itself out. Not really a solution, but at least you should be OK in the long run if you can't fix it.