Thread: Ram or CPU? Whats More Important???

A quick question...

I am looking at getting a new dedicated box since I have outgrown my current setup (Xirvik Essential Dedi).



From experience is the amount of ram you have (ie. 2Gb vs 4Gb) or a faster CPU (ie. celeron vs Xeon) more important when you have hundreds of torrents on your box?

I leave all my torents seeding and only delete the oldest as I run out of hdd space, however it would easily add up to 100+ torrents a week thanks to good ol RSS feeds

Any comments or suggestions would be appreciated

Actually, the most important thing is your bandwidth, IMO.
You can get a Seedbox, it's cheaper and it's a better solution if your bandwidth is really small.

well RAM let's you do more things and faster if you have enough of it.

If you want a good seedbox, then you must look at the amount of RAM.
This is very important, because high bandwith eats a lot of RAM

I vote for RAM. It's always about RAM.
CPU is very powerful today while the price of RAM is still higher

I think CPU :P

Actually, it is a little bit of CPU, but a huge chunk is your HDD's.

Look at the stats on any seedbox if you have the right software, and it will show your biggest bottleneck is your Hard Drive. Quite often with high bandwidth and high ram, you can't write to the HDD fast enough to keep up. So the data just sits in RAM waiting for the HDD to catch up. Meanwhile because the disk is not doing it's job fast enough, your CPU get's loaded up, trying to keep data flowing in all the right directions. I switched to two pairs of HDD's in a raid config, and doubled my throughput. This was with 4gig of ram and a 2.2ghz processor.

The best way to fix a problem would be to find your bottleneck first, and work from there.

I think it's the RAM that plays big roll in DL/UL speeds more than CPU. With low RAM you can get easily error messages like this : (Storage error: [File chunk write error: Cannot allocate memory.]) and when you get them they can cripple your speeds a lot.

Originally Posted by Legen_Dary

Actually, the most important thing is your bandwidth, IMO.
You can get a Seedbox, it's cheaper and it's a better solution if your bandwidth is really small.

Well yes good point that is very true

I get great speeds with my current dedicated 100Mb line (when it's not being hammered with new stuff)

I notice when say a new torrent is added via rss for a popular show from multiple trackers/different sizes it might add 10+ torrents for that show maxing out the ram and/or cpu which causes both the upload and download speeds to drop from very high to very low quite quickly, which of course has the effect of downloads taking longer/missing out on the peak seeding minutes.

There are usually 20-30 active torrents uploading all the time, which then can blow out to a lot more when new shows are released.

I am currently just using the stock settings Xirvik set the box up with...