Thread: Help with rtorrent.rc - wine + utorrent is always faster than rtorrent on my vps?

Ummm, great.. I'd agree that the rtorrent configuration is a prime suspect.
But that makes the config settings for the two clients crucial information. And you didn't post those for us to examine.. ?

Thanks for the link to the rtorrent.rc (rtorrent config). You didn't provide a full rc.conf (utorrent config), but the limited details you provided are sufficient to suggest that your rtorrent settings are limited by comparison. Since the two configs appear to have significant differences, the speed disparity isn't surprising.

e.g.
.........................utorrent .....rtorrent
global connects: ..950............100 up/10 down
upload slots: .........50..............20

For a start, I'd suggest that you compare your two configs and increase the corresponding rtorrent parameters that are more restrictive. I'd also try changing the following rtorrent settngs below and then see if your rtorrent speeds go up.

udp - is there a restrictive firewall or good reason why you aren't allowing udp connects?
encryption - forced encryption often boosts speeds considerably
max http sockets - your setting of 4 is very low. why?


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The settings were just as that copied from the guide, I had assumed they were at least optimized for a 100/100 seedbox. I guess I was gravely mistaken. For one I was not entirely sure which each setting meant.

udp - I assumed it was off for a good reason
encryption I shall force it on and see for the improvement.
max http sockets - again I assumed it was a proper value, what would you suggest an adequate value for it. I cannot find an explanation for its use?

I have changed my settings to this

min_peers = 20
max_peers = 200
min_peers_seed =35
max_peers_seed = 250
max_uploads = 50
max_open_files = 256
max_open_http = 16
max_open_sockets = 768

Please do comment if you see more wrong.

Originally Posted by tnoob

The settings were just as that copied from the guide, I had assumed they were at least optimized for a 100/100 seedbox. I guess I was gravely mistaken. For one I was not entirely sure which each setting meant ...

No, I don't think that those settings were optimized. There could be a variety of reasons for that.. conservative settings probably reduce their support load, your provider may have been too lazy to tweak them or they might even be trying to reduce resource use. After all a lot of people will just run with the default settings. Some settings will be obscure and unless you are the resident expert to start with, you just have to Google to find out what they control.

In any event, to make a valid comparison.. try to adjust the rtorrent settings as close to the utorrent ones as possible. At least until you match the utorrent speeds or are otherwise satisfied with your rtorrent performance. Most of the performance difference is probably due to the greater number of connects that utorrent had been configured for. But it's worth trying the other settings too and see what you get.

Encryption may increase speeds if there is any ISP throttling in your path. It's less of an issue with seedboxes than home connections, but forced encryption is still a good idea IMO even if it is performance neutral because it has privacy and security benefits. UDP is normally enabled. I don't see a reason to disable it unless your seedbox providers firewall is very restrictive. And honestly, I don't have a solid understanding of http sockets either. But a quick Google said that the default was 32, so I was wondering why it had been set to 4. See if your increase to 16 has any effect. The http sockets may only affect the response time to your web GUI, rather than torrents per se, but I'd leave it at 16 if you don't observe any ill effects.

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Hi,

HTTP sockets is the number of open HTTP connections rtorrent is allowed. This is just for scraping/updating tracker URLS. Go into a torrents details and press 't' a couple of times. This forces a tracker update, in the bottom right corner you will see [H 0/32] change to [H 1/32] as it performs the update. This might have been limited if the version of curl compiled into rtorrent had issues with too many open connections.

It is not used by the GUI in any way.

Q

Thanks for the clarification about http sockets.

So then tnoob, it's entirely plausible that there could be some speed advantage in setting http sockets > 4. Provided that you don't get curl error messages or unexpected behavior. If you do experience unexpected errors, then back off the setting for http sockets to 8, 6 or 4 as necessary. Or even better, try a newer version of rtorrent that presumably wouldn't have issues with more sockets.