Wiki > rTorrent

rTorrent is the default bittorrent client on Whatbox slots. It is a text-based client, but can also be controlled through several graphical interfaces.

Interfaces

Text-based ncurses interface

The built in text-based interface provides an efficient way to control rTorrent for users comfortable with text-based interfaces and SSH. By default, Whatbox runs rTorrent within a screen. This allows users to disconnect from rTorrent while leaving it running. To connect to rTorrent execute screen -r over SSH. To disconnect without stopping rTorrent use Ctrl-AD

The official rTorrent user guide explains all the commands and controls available. Basic use:

ruTorrent

ruTorrent is the simplest interface for normal use. It provides a graphical interface similar to that of uTorrent.

Transdroid

Transdroid is an open-source application for managing torrents from Android devices. It is able to connect rTorrent, as well as Deluge and Transmission. For more information on Transdroid and a guide to configuring it, see the Transdroid article.

Configuration

rTorrent is pre-configured and ready for use but you can change or add settings if you wish to. The configuration can be made by modifying rTorrent's configuration file, which is found at ~/.config/rtorrent/rtorrent.rc on Whatbox servers. Some settings can be changed through ruTorrent's graphical preferences panel.

For further information on editing rTorrent's configuration please take a look at the main article Editing rtorrent.rc

Command Line Restart

To restart rtorrent from the command-line, simply run the following command: killall rtorrent\ main && screen -dmS rTorrent rtorrent

Performance tuning

The official wiki provides information on rTorrent performance tuning.

On Whatbox, the default configuration for user limits and rtorrent limits are very generous. The downside is that it's easy to overdo it and end up making your torrenting slower.

You should always consider that resources are not unlimited and there are other users too. If you have 12 TB of torrents and you connect to thousands of nodes, each requesting a different 16 MB block, clearly rTorrent won't have enough memory to serve all of them at once from cache.

If you suspect your torrenting is slower than it should be, an easy test is to pause a majority of your torrents: if total speeds increases rather than going down, it probably means your resources were overstretched. To increase speed, then, it helps to reduce limits. Try and set network.max_open_files = 100 or lower, or reduce the various throttle.max* configurations like throttle.max_downloads.global.set, throttle.max_uploads.global.set, throttle.max_downloads.set, throttle.max_uploads.set until you see that the global speed and individual peers' speed make sense again. The same configuration settings are also available from ruTorrent, scattered across various tabs in the configuration panel.