Raspberry Pi as dedicated, optimized Seedbox

[wavefunction]

Hey all,

I know there are a few posts on here about using raspberry pi as a dedicated seedbox on here, but hopefully this will serve to expand on the idea. Up until now, I was using a HPC as a seedbox (terrible idea), but once I read about raspberry pi, I figured it would be a natural solution to freeing up resources on my performance machine while having a headless seedbox/sftp machine that I wouldn't be too worried about if it got bricked for whatever reason. I'm currently using Raspbian with the Transmission torrent client. I got it working, but there's a few things I'd like to tweak to optimize the performance while (hopefully) lessening the load on the already small cpu.

Whenever I download using the private tracker that I use, it maxes out my cpu. I have a feeling that this is due to the fact that I'm getting down speeds of 1.0 MB/s +, but that's not something that I really want to throttle. Is this something that I should be worried about? It's fine if I have only one download running, but I'm concerned that if I run multiple at a time, it will crash. That, and I'm not sure what the cpu load of seeding is yet. If this is a concern, is there any way to remedy this?

As I was previously running transmission on a desktop, I've become hopelessly addicted to the GUI. I'm not a fan of this. I feel as though I'm needlessly taking up cpu resources with the X-server that could be better appropriated to other tasks (such as DL/Seed). I know that I can run transmission-daemon and get it to run in the background, but before I do that, I'd like a few things cleared up. I set up everything with the GUI, and I was wondering if I could stop the GUI, run the daemon, and essentially be where I stopped with the GUI. I guess my question is: will I have to re-verify the data of all my torrent that I'm seeding, set up my defaults for DL directories and autostarting torrents, etc..; or is this all cached somewhere that the transition will be seemless? It took me a while to get things as I like them, so the smallest amount of tweaking upon transition would be awesome.

Other than there, are the any suggestions as to how to further optimize the RPi as a seedbox? I haven't done any network configuration as to improve connect-ability, etc, but I'd be interested in fiddling with it if anyone can point me in the right direction.

[n3tm4n]

I once had one running using torrent and tutorrent as the Web based gui. Worked quiet well, not the snappiest gui experience but served is purpose.

Personally I would stay well away from running a desktop and then a gui on the one pi. As they say YMMV.

Don't know if it is because I'm old or its my line of work but I now prefer the CLI where possible.

[wavefunction]

Yea, I'm not a fan of GUI for most purposes, and I prefer a CLI wherever possible. That why I want to move over to the daemon, and that I can shut X down and I can reappropriate cpu resources where they're actually needed. I just want to see if there's a way to start the daemon without having to reconfigure everything

[ghans]

At least with deluge , you have the choice to use the GUI
as "complete" torrent program or as a "dumb" client to the
deluged server.

In the latter case , all the configuration has to be done
server-side , and you can switch clients anytime anywhere -
from an Android client to a command-line interface on your
Mint laptop to using the web-interface in a French
internet-cafe while abroad (provided you use
port-forwarding + NoIP + SSL). All clients should be synced as
the don't do anything except delegating (you can add/remove/
modify torrents easily).

I'm pretty sure transmission allows this mode of operation , too ,
so check the wiki.


ghans

[wavefunction]

I ended up just re-configuring transmission-daemon and shutting down the gtk GUI. Come to find out that, unlike the GUI, the daemon automatically verifies local data when the location is changed to the right directory, so that made it a pretty painless transition.

So when I'm DLing, I run top to get the cpu usage breakdown. Is it strange that on average 75% is dedicated to NTFS writing and only ~20% is dedicated to the actual DL? Or is that to be expected? I guess it would make sense that writing would be a much more cpu intensive job, but is there any way to take some of the load off the cpu?

[ghans]

If you can use ext4 instead of NTFS , reformat the disk. NTFS
access is very slow and CPU-intensive on the Pi.


ghans