Torrent server

[uukrul]

There is some NAS (even routers with an USB port) that allows the installation on transmission and works perfectly. There is a NAS in dealextreme that cost less than the raspberry and allows torrents download without a problem, even to a NTFS disk. But the raspberry can´t...

It seems like the raspberry only works well as a media center with OpenElec...

[Caótico Fanegas]

As I said before, don't panic and give it some time, we'll figure out how to make it work.

[juanmol]

any solution that need to decrease speed, peers or conection, is not a solution. Use other hardware (like the nas option) or store temporally the torrents in SD, is not a solution. Torrents in Raspberry need to work perfectly, like in normal pcs. We don't need half solutions.

[jerhat]

I agree with you juanmol.

A friend of mine has a pi from the first batch. He never experienced this freeze issue when bittorrenting. I got mine from the second batch and am facing the problem. Could this issue be related to different hardware revisions of the pi (especially the ram chip) as described here : http://elinux.org/RaspberryPi_Boards ?

(this is just a idea...)

[juanmol]

mine from 2nd batch too

[uukrul]

Mine from 2nd batch too...

hmmmm...

[errikos]

I have currently 10 hours uptime with Raspbian hexxeh image, updated kernel Linux raspbian 3.2.21-rpi1+ #9 Sat Jun 23 11:07:26 BST 2012 armv6l GNU/Linux from chris, updated firmware and with the two parameters "smsc95xx.turbo_mode=N" to /boot/cmdline.txt and
vm.min_free_kbytes =16384

No error message and swat works ok. We will see the next days, but still seems ok!

After ~4 days of uptime, it freezed. I hope something new will help us deal with this issue...

[jerhat]

I agree with you juanmol.

A friend of mine has a pi from the first batch. He never experienced this freeze issue when bittorrenting. I got mine from the second batch and am facing the problem. Could this issue be related to different hardware revisions of the pi (especially the ram chip) as described here : http://elinux.org/RaspberryPi_Boards ?

(this is just a idea...)

I reply to myself. Just tried with my friend's pi with my sd, it freezed. So it doesn't look like a hardware problem. However we could clearly see that the 2 pi's are different (Hynix RAM for his, samsung for mine)

[JF002]

Hi!

I'm also running a torrent client (Transmission) on my Pi and observed kernel panics during downloads.

My setup:
* Debian Wheezy (beta image), no firmware or kernel modifications
* Download on a USB hard drive (connected on a powered HUB)
* In /etc/sysctl.conf, vm.min_free_kbytes is set to 8192 and swappiness to 1 (default values)

My observations :
* Crashes seem to occur when a lot of peers are connected or when download speed is high (~2MB/s).
* Before the crash, in HTOP, I see that the CPU load is at around 100%, with almost 50% used by kernel threads (in HTOP, the cpu bar is half green and half red).
* HTOP reports that the average system load reaches 7.50, which is too high, in my opinion
* The memory usage is low (max 70Mo)
* SSH becomes very laggy, I have to wait for 30sec to have an answer to a simple "Enter"
* Sometimes, the system does not crash, but becomes unusable until the download speed goes down or at the end of the download, sometimes, the kernel panics

On the other hand, I installed a Ubuntu virtual machine on my computer using the ISO file via a SAMBA share located on the external hard drive connected to the Pi without any problem. So, it doesn't seem that the USB/Eth bandwidth is the only problem...

I don't know if any of these information will be useful...

[uukrul]

For the record, I´m downloading right now heavy Xbox-360 isos (aprox. 8 gb each one) via direct download with Pyload in the same Raspbian image that I post here earlier... and no hangs at all. No kernel panics and any other weird thing since 3 days ago, and with higher download rates (1mb/s facing 700kb/s from transmission)

Obviously the problem here is the CPU overload with a huge number of connections, with a torrent client. Working with direct downloads the CPU load is lower, I suppose.

[cupill]

Hi,

Another tester joined the thread

So I'm using uukrul's image provided 2 pages ago (or so).

I use the transmission torrent client, for now limited to 1 download at a time, 300KB/s max. It doesn't bother me, as I'm not a huge torrent-downloaded-stuff consumer.

It's all running on a 32GB class 4 SD card, via ethernet.

I just reached 3 hours of uptime ( ) without crash, and still running. Far better than the previous 5 to 10 minutes.

I'll try to increase the max number of simultaneous downloads / download speed day after day to see how it behaves.

[obarthelemy]

You'll fry your SD rather quickly, bittorrent makes a lot a very small writes.

[cupill]

Then I guess I'll abuse of the card's lifetime guarantee

[ScorpAL]

Can somebody build latest Transmission?

[tomaac]

Hi everyone.

I had similar problems with my Raspberry Pi and rtorrent - after downloading files for 30-40 minutes, RPi ended with kernel Oops.

So here is what I did:

- Installed Debian Squeeze from Raspberry Pi download site
- apt-get update && apt-get upgrade
- installed newest firmware with rpi-update tool
- cp /boot/arm224_start.elf /boot/start.elf (since I dont use GUI, just CLI)
- set vm.min_free_kbytes to 16384
- set swap area on dedicated USB flash - 512 MB
- upgraded kernel to 3.2.21 from http://www.bootc.net/projects/raspberry-pi-kernel/
- run rpi-update again
- remove config file from /boot/
- install rtorrent (without any gui or web)
- set following values in config file:

Code: Select all

max_peers = 20
max_peers_seed = 10
max_uploads = 5
download_rate = 3000
upload_rate = 500
hash_read_ahead = 5
hash_max_tries = 5

Code: Select all

pi@raspberrypi:~$ uname -a
Linux raspberrypi 3.2.21-rpi1+ #12 Sun Jul 1 18:10:03 BST 2012 armv6l GNU/Linux

Code: Select all

pi@raspberrypi:~$ cat /etc/debian_version
6.0.5

So far I have been running rtorrent for a couple of hours downloading multiple mkv files simultaneously. It seems that it works just fine. Of course I will test it for longer period.

Btw I am using HTC 5v-1A charger + Belkin 7 port powered USB Hub, if that matters. All downloads goes to my 2.5'' USB HDD.

[cupill]

A friend of mine tested the latest raspbian Pisces image (r3), available since july 10th:
http://www.raspbian.org/PiscesImages

It seems stable so far, not a lot of feedback though, it's still pretty new.

I'll test it myself in a few days.

[LetHopeItsSnowing]

I experienced a similar problem with the pi freezing under heavy load; Im using it as a BBC iplayer downloader and podcast creator http://stuffaboutcode.blogspot.co.uk/20 ... sonal.html and it was driving me nuts; I run a scheduled job which downloads and encodes any new content from iplayer, copies the output to a nas and runs a python program to create and RSS feed and honestly it went down easier than a cold beer on a hot day.

I solved it by simply applying the latest firmware and kernel using rpi-update, https://github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/ to the debian squeeze distro and my pi has been rock solid since, see http://stuffaboutcode.blogspot.co.uk/20 ... ed-by.html.

LHIS

[cupill]

My Friend's rpi finally froze... Not so stable then.

As far as I am concerned, limiting bandwidth to 300kB/s works, 500 ends freezing, 400 is ongoing, seems stable.

I'll keep it that way I think.

[fox]

I have the same issue but only with wifi. If i'm using ethernet everything works like a charm! I tried various wifi dongles but none works well, the raspberry freezes after some minutes. The issue is that I don't have any ethernet plug neat the tv so using wifi is the only way.
I'm using the lastest OpenELEC.

[JF002]

I also noticed that after updating with rpi-update, it seems more stable but... it crashes under heavy load (lots of connection, high speed,..).

When I start too many torrent at a time, transmission gets killed by the kernel when the system runs out of memory, which is an expected behaviour.

[Pakka]

Would it be difficult for a noob to install Raspian with some video player or functionality similar to XBMC, and some torrent app too? I'm currently on OpenElec but can't get transmission to work.

[tuananh]

arch and transmission seems pretty stable to me (3 hours, not so heavy load ~ 10 torrents and speed limit 500KB/s

[chochis]

Consider joining the cause?
https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/56

[errikos]

Has anyone tried the new raspbian image?

Anyone tried that image:
http://www.bootc.net/archives/2012/07/1 ... 23-kernel/
?
The latter is more promising...

[cptwunderlich]

I had massive issues with the original Debian Wheezy image. With full speed, it would crash after a few minutes.
Then I tried the Raspbian image and rpi-updated. It didn't work either, but that was because of the faulty kernel/firmware. I updated it again yesterday and it works like a charm now. Downloaded several Gigabytes already.

Btw. I'm using transmission-daemon v2.52 and downloading onto an external hard disc.