Thread: Seedbox hardware.

I'm surprised this hasn't come up before, or at least not from what I've seen, but how much ram/CPU power do you need for a seedbox?

Not very much, but the more the better. I would recommend at least 512mb of ram and a celeron. That would be on a machine dedicated only to the seedbox. If your running alot of other stuff, you want to move the ram and CPU up.

Not that I'm an expert on this, but something in proportion to HDD space and upload speed, because you want to max out the connection you have. With a huge hard drive you're probably going to have a lot of torrents so you will need to have a lot of RAM and likewise you're going to need a lot of RAM when you have a 1Gbit connection as you're going to have a lot of connections in order to maximize it. I just don't know which factor will cause the bottle neck first and in what ratio you're supposed to add RAM and increase CPU frequency. I assume it also depends a lot on your BT client, at least I believe that there are differences in how well they have been optimized.

for example, if you have a seedbox with intel Xeon Quadcore shared with 8 ppl and with lets say 1,5 GB dedicated ram for each user, will it max out your 1gb connection ?

No. In Gbit connections the real bottleneck is the HDD since RAM and CPU are rarely the problem (most seedboxes have plenty of RAM and CPU). Assuming that you are the only user on the HDD, you might see some speeds touching 90-100 MB/s for a few seconds but these are burst speeds. Usually, the maximum sustained speed you can get will be around 50-60 MB/s.

With 8 users per server, this leaves at least 2 users per disk which means that your speeds will depend on what the other users are doing. Now add the fact that 1 Gbit is shared between 8 users and you get a pretty good image of what you will get.

If you want good Gbit speeds, the first thing you need is a dedicated HDD.

Yeah I know the limitation of hard drives, it is the slowest component in the computers next to optical drives. 1Gbit = 125 Megabytes So your never gonna see all of that bandwidth unless you have a raid 0/10/50? configuration or a ssd. I was primarily interested in 100 Mbit connections since to get the full effect of the Gbit, your paying serious money for a box or server that has the hard drives to support it.

For example a server with 8-15 users and 3-5 per hdd running r/utorrent seedboxes, how much hardware are you looking at per user? Also say I would have 450-700 GB or storage for my box on that server.

One more thing, some companies offer burstable ram. Ex. !.5GB(2GB) Is this a gimick or does it actually effect your speed say over a week time span.

Originally Posted by silentfred

For example a server with 8-15 users and 3-5 per hdd running r/utorrent seedboxes, how much hardware are you looking at per user? Also say I would have 450-700 GB or storage for my box on that server.

One more thing, some companies offer burstable ram. Ex. !.5GB(2GB) Is this a gimick or does it actually effect your speed say over a week time span.

8-15 users with 3-5 per HDD is too much. I would stay away from anything like that. But that's just my opinion.

As for the burstable ram, depends on the dedicated ram that you have and the use of your box. If you use it only for torrenting, burstable ram makes little to no difference at all if you go above 2 GB dedicated ram. Deluge has a cap at 1.5 GB and rtorrent will hardly ever use above 1-1.5 GB ram (usually it will be much lower than that). I haven't try other clients though.