UTorrent "Overloads" disk

[greenwas]

I am experiencing pretty terrible writes to my FreeNAS when using uTorrent on a separate host. I did not heed JGrego's HW advice out of the gate and previously had to purchase an M1015 to get my drives recognized. So I went ahead and got a dual port Intel NIC because I figured that might have been partially to blame.

I have run Crystal Disk mark from the uTorrent host and I get about 35MB/45MB Seq read/write to an NFS share on the RAIDz-1 pool which is much slower than I was anticipating. I get about 90MB writes from the same machine whn using a multi-threaded robocopy instance. I believe I am only getting about 120MB writes from the RAID-10 to the RAIZ-1.

If I am running uTorrent with cached mode turned off I will only get about 9kB/s downloads but I am utilizing 40-60Mbit on my NIC. If I enable the default cache write speeds will improve a little bit and the "Disk Overloaded" alert will be going off. If I bump the cache to 512MB I am able to hit my DL limit at 3.5-3.7 MB and eventually the disk overload pops up. After the disk overloaded error message the download will go down to about 900kB and the overload will stay at about 40%. Going above 512 MB just delays how long it takes for the disk overloaded messages to begin. Any help that can be provided will be greatly appreciated.

 

[JaimieV]

The real answer is "don't do that". Torrenting writes segments of files into the correct location in the destination file; some sharing protocols really hate doing that, and I suspect you're using one like that. iSCSI would probably be fine; SMB (Windows shares) not so much.

You'd be much better off adding the Jail and a torrent plugin, as then the torrent software is running locally and can address the disk directly. This also means you don't need to run another machine constantly, thereby saving power. Every little helps these days...

 

[greenwas]

Thanks for the advice. As for the power savings - This was my torrent box\HTPC until FreeNAS came along. Now it is my host\HTPC until my virtual host arrives for the home lab and I can build a proper HTPC.

 

[JaimieV]

By power saving I mean the second box currently running the torrent client could be slept/turned off, if you migrate the torrenting to the NAS. Currently you need two machines running. This may not be a problem, of course!

Depending what host you're running uTorrent on, you may have more choices of sharing protocol to try. If Windows, you're largely stuck; Linux you can try iSCSI and NFS; Mac try AFP or NFS.

 

[greenwas]

The host is Windows 7 which I installed the NFS client on.

 

[JaimieV]

Can uTorrent be set to move completed torrents to a different folder? That would solve your problem - set the initial working download folder to local, and the completed folder to the NAS.

 

[greenwas]

I thought of that but it would add an extra layer of complexity for me because I will eventually be setting up XBMC and I believe it is recommended for different media types (Movies, TV, Music) to be in separate directories. I was also planning on virtualizing my torrent host but I am now considering getting transmission up and running instead.

 

[greenwas]

Sorry to bump an old thread but I just wanted to post a quick update....... Creating an iSCSI file extent did not improve the throughput from my torrent host. Finally decided to implement Transmission and I am happy to state that it could not have been easier with 9.1. I have not used the older implementations so I do not have a frame of reference but the current version will most certainly suffice for organizing torrents. All I need to do is upload the torrent file and then make sure that it doesn't auto start so I can go back and set the location for the download.