Transmission Plugin (torrent) Performance W/FreeNAS 8.2-8.3

[Foonus]

Ran up a new 8.3 Beta2 build tonite of FreeNAS and still seems to be plagued with issues for the Transmission Plugin/client.

Here is the testing configuration.

Connection 250Mbit Download 15Mbit Upload
Firewall: PFsense 2.1 - UPNP / NAT enabled. NO STATIC ROUTES OR PORT FORWARDS to conflict with the automatic mapping - NIC Intel Gigabit CTx2
Torrent server 1: Windows 7 (Port shows open in torrent app) - Client Utorrent 3.3 - NIC Intel Gigabit CT
Torrent server 2: FreeNAS 8.3 (Port shows open in managment interface) - Client Transmission 2.51 (outdated but all we got atm) - NIC Intel Gigabit CT

Below is a screenshot of the performance of both configurations http://img267.imageshack.us/img267/4558/transbad.jpg
The screenshot is an overlay of the Utorrent client over the background Transmission web GUI. Both are serving the exact same (42) torrents. As you can see the Utorrent using the same automatic port forwarding has almost 10 peers (even though it wasnt even fully updated), yet the Transmission/FreeNAS server was only connected to 4 peers, and uploading only 5K at that. These results have been consistent with all of the builds of FreeNAS i have tried now since 8.2, and its quite frustrating. Really don't know what to do aside from post here about it and hope someone has some input, i know that the Transmission client plugin itself for FreeNAS is now outdated and needs revision, but this seems outside the scope of most users since it hasn't been done for over 4 months.

Does anyone see similar results when running the transmission plugin, IE, peers not connecting, terribly slow uploads when they do?
Any assistance would be much appreciated.

 

[Foonus]

Looked into this a bit more and with some testing it seems that the issue is with the UPNP side of the client. Once I switched to static port mapping it seems to work a little better, but still doenst connect to any IPv6 addressses for some reason where the Windows Utorrent client does, both pulling DHCP config from the same router. It does run a bit better now but still there is quite a bit of speed disparity since it doesnt connect to IPv6 clients, and it seems that those are usually the ones with the fastest (newest) connections.

Checked out the release notes for the latest Transmission clients and apparently they have updated miniupnpc 2 times now since the revision that is included with 8.3 B2. (2.51)

Transmission 2.60 (2012/07/05)

Updated versions of miniupnpc and libuTP
Fixed compilation issues with Solaris and FreeBSD


Transmission 2.52 (2012/05/19)

Update the bundled libnatpmp and miniupnp port forwarding libraries

Though its a seperate issue from the UPNP and Transmission, I did set up an NIC interface and enabled IPv6 from DHCP just as the windows box is set (and working) but it didn't pull/assign any address to the FreeNAS one.

 

[William Grzybowski]

Next 8.3 will bring transmission plugin with version 2.61. Lets see how that goes. Either way, I don't think FreeNAS is really prepared for IPv6 yet.

 

[Foonus]

Excellent news on the updated plugin, shame about the IPv6 though. Since there is specific reason I am looking for IPv6 in a Torrent server, may have to build another Bill Box. Have a look below if interested...

BitTorrent Users Outsmart Throttling ISPs With IPv6
http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-users-outsmart-throttling-isps-with-ipv6-110826/

 

[anika200]

I have just set this up with the latest 8.3.1 and the latest available plugin and I still have slow performance. Upspeed is maxing out at 40 kB/3 with an average of 4 peers with the same torrents using Ktorrent on a linux box will push 2500 kB/s and I get 20-50 peers average. I have a PCBSD box with the exact same hardware that I want to test out and see if there is any better performance there.

I just looked over the 24hr logs and there were times that the torrent Upspeed did get up to 1500 kB/s so maybe it is not as bad as it seems at the moment.