Thread: How many torrents can I expect to seed on VPS seedbox?

Hello. I rented a seedbox a few days ago and this is my first time. It is a VPS and I got one with 100Gb HD and 500 Mb of ram with unlimited bandwidth. I'm paying $20 USD for this. I thought it was a good deal for "unlimited"

Everything seemed fine at first. It's fast as hell. The problem is that torrents are using way more ram than I thought they would. Right now I'm just seeding 10 inactive torrents and I'm at 80% memory usage. If I add 3 or 4 more I'll run out of memory and my torrents freeze due to no memory.

Is this typical or should I open a support ticket?

It's running torrentflux-b4rt on ubuntu

im not a fan of torrentflux... its an outdated client/frontend. check out rtorrent. rtorrent can handle thousands of torrents with minimal ram usage. you might want to switch OS too, as ubuntu tends to use more ram than, for example debian. 512MB as available ram really isnt much, but for the space you got, it should suffice given you use the resources available perfectly

Originally Posted by Marle

im not a fan of torrentflux... its an outdated client/frontend. check out rtorrent. rtorrent can handle thousands of torrents with minimal ram usage. you might want to switch OS too, as ubuntu tends to use more ram than, for example debian. 512MB as available ram really isnt much, but for the space you got, it should suffice given you use the resources available perfectly

As he said switch to rtorrent, i have one seedbox that is like your with 512 megs of RAM and it currently has 2 active and 259 inactive torrents(i only do this because it is unlikley they will become active/stay active for long as they are small files on a mostly seedbox tracker, don't do that on ones that have a decent change of becoming active), it is at 11% RAM usage.

512 MB should be fine for just fetching and buffering.

It also depends on the torrents and swarms, my other seedbox has the same 512 megs of ram and only 44 torrents(6 active, but these are torrents that are larger than 200 MB) and it is at 15% RAM usage.

Also rtorrent gives you more options for management, such as from your phone, your desktop without needing a web browser open, and has better scripting options.

Thanks guys!! I switched the torrents over to rtorrent and there is hardly a ram hit at all from seeding. I'm now at 35% ram but it starts off with like 32% without any torrents. Huge difference. Rtorrent rocks. I might try switching over to CentOs but I gotta check into whether it's worth the trouble or not.

Also try to get rutorrent for web interface.
And the operational system the more basic you can get the better, thats why debian is better then ubuntu.

Originally Posted by pullups

Thanks guys!! I switched the torrents over to rtorrent and there is hardly a ram hit at all from seeding. I'm now at 35% ram but it starts off with like 32% without any torrents. Huge difference. Rtorrent rocks. I might try switching over to CentOs but I gotta check into whether it's worth the trouble or not.

It's what we are here for :P

Also swapping to CentOS isn't worth the trouble unless you already know CentOS.There are other OS's to try that could be worth it as well as other Filesystems, but CentOS doesn't offer anything over Ubuntu server unless you want the Red Hat Environment because you are used to it, or RHEL support.

I checked my control panel again and I can actually install Debian 5.0 on it from there. The only problem is I would have to upload like 50Gb of files back on there and I'm not sure I want to do that. I might just switch over to a different host in a few days. The one I'm on downloads off of the trackers pretty fast but when I FTP download to my house it only downloads at like 3-400 KB/s.

Checking Evoboxes which is what I've had my eye on, and the "leaf" is not available now. Boo.

Originally Posted by pullups

I checked my control panel again and I can actually install Debian 5.0 on it from there. The only problem is I would have to upload like 50Gb of files back on there and I'm not sure I want to do that. I might just switch over to a different host in a few days. The one I'm on downloads off of the trackers pretty fast but when I FTP download to my house it only downloads at like 3-400 KB/s.

Checking Evoboxes which is what I've had my eye on, and the "leaf" is not available now. Boo.

Well I doubt you'll gain much by switching to Debian, also try CuteFTP or a segmented downloader to get faster than 400 kbps.

First of all, the load bar you see in the left bottom is NOT the RAM as many people believe.
It is the CPU load that is assigned to the VPS.

If that goes over 25 maybe 30 % you will notice problems.
512mb for a VPS is not done....
Any host offering that is scamming you because to run a decent vps you need at least 1Gb ram
The problem is that as soon as there is a leecher on one of the inactive torrents there are 2 things that can happen when you have less then 1GB ram:

1. The torrent won't connect to peers because the connection needs resources too and it just will not give you that
2. The torrent does connect and will slow your vps to the extreme, NEVER user more then 4 connections per torrent on less then 2GB ram by the way

Also make sure you never buy VPS on gbit with less then 3GB RAM, rTorrent will crash as soon as you get above 30% (more or less) and run 2 or 3 torrents.
Also make sure you have at least 2 CPU's assigned to your VPS with at least 2.8Ghz in total but i prefer per CPU unit.
And last and final tip!!! Do not buy VPS with low resources on a XEN system, find a host that offers OpenVZ VPS
XEN needs at least 1.3GB RAM to run in the background and uses 50% of CPU if you dont have enough memory to cover the load.

We have tested all available systems to the extreme before we started offering VPS and the way we setup our VPS Masters and Slaves (nodes) is the best way to go with rTorrent (or torrentflux for that matter)

If you do use torrentflux, make sure you do 2 things:
Set max connections to 4
Set time to log actions to 2 days max (load will get lower)

Torrentflux can run as smooth as rtorrent unlike what people here say, we have been using it for years.
It is just the way you set it up
DO NOT USE B4rt that will kill your resources, too much crap build in.
Use the original latest torrentflux version of you dont want multiuser setups.

To setup Torrentflux you NEED CentOS
That is the only OS that allows you to run torrentflux smoothly as it was meant to be.

Debian is not an option for torrentflux, debian is really heavy when you use torrentflux.
For rTorrent we also recommend CentOS but Debian 6x is fine
Make sure to update correctly.

The only reason why people dont like to use CentOS is because it is not as easy to handle (code) as debian)
CentOS is for the real pro's but we do reccommend it for most installs.

Debian though is the only other good option (or Ubuntu LTS Lucid, which is Debian based)