best remote bitorrent client?

[Ultra_Magnus]

I will be getting a microserver soon for, amongst other things, bitorrent; that I will be running ubuntu on.  What is the best linux bitorrent client that can be controlled remotely from a mac?

[Mirgond]

rtorrent ?

transmission is an alternative if you want to use a web-gui in your browser. You just have to remember to set a good password and open the right port

[Slasha]

deluge is also very popular

[per]

I run uTorrent in wine. I guess that could be considered cheating.

[zetskee]

I would say that rtorrent with a web interface like wtorrent or rutorrent is the best option for a server. As far as I know, the other options mentioned here can't be run from a console.

[kitamesume]

if only you were using windows... you could practically pilot your server's GUI from another PC through the net =P what was it called again? remote management?

[kureshii]

if only you were using windows... you could practically pilot your server's GUI from another PC through the net =P what was it called again? remote management?

Linux has RDP servers as well, and has had them for a number of years. And before that we had VNC, not to mention X over SSH.

Still, it is a poor solution for laggy/slower connections, and generally a waste of bandwidth when you don't require a full GUI. a web UI or console-GUI solution is much more bandwidth-efficient.


@OP:
I've had pretty good success with ruTorrent+rtorrent; you can try that as recommended by zetskee, or try transmission/deluge. Try a few different setups, see which you like best.

[jackoneill]

Transmission has a daemon, a web ui, and a qt client that can serve as a regular torrent client or it can connect to any local or remote transmission daemon. There is also an official cli client (not interactive) and a number of unofficial console clients (ncurses and whatnot).

http://www.transmissionbt.com/resources/

[per]

Both transmission and rtorrent does not really scale all that well when you have a non-insignificant amount of active torrents.

rtorrent, at least 1+ years ago when I tried, seems to assume that disk reads are basically instant, and does not queue them very well either, which really helps when you have a multi-disk raid.

it went to 100% CPU when sharing to a low-thousand number of peers, almost all time spent in kernel (select, it seems that they are not using epoll). And since the disk is mmapped as memory, accesses to it is blocking. So in essence only one read is done at once.

The again, I guess they work just fine for "normal" amounts of torrents (and bandwidth) even if they are inefficient.

I never got transmission running correctly with my torrent list at all.

[kureshii]

it went to 100% CPU when sharing to a low-thousand number of peers, almost all time spent in kernel (select, it seems that they are not using epoll). And since the disk is mmapped as memory, accesses to it is blocking. So in essence only one read is done at once.

Check the MaxMultSec setting in hdparm for each disk in the array. Once I enabled it I got much better mdraid performance and rtorrent read/writes (when running other concurrent disk i/o stuff). I haven't tested this with a not-insignificant number of torrents though.

[kitamesume]

^ how many torrents do you have to keep running to reach the non-insignificant numbers of torrents?

well i mean, i'm sure below 100torrents is still insignificant... ignore this if it isnt true =P

[per]

Check the MaxMultSec setting in hdparm for each disk in the array. Once I enabled it I got much better mdraid performance and rtorrent read/writes (when running other concurrent disk i/o stuff). I haven't tested this with a not-insignificant number of torrents though.

Well. I am running solaris, so I cannot use hdparm.

Anyway, it is set to the highest supported by the hardware by default (max 16 pending requests/disk, but the OS itself of course has a way longer queue).

The issue is that rtorrent only does one I/O at a time, so you are basically limiting the performance to that of one disk (the one with the requested data) instead of to the whole stripe+zraid (which is in my cased at least 5x higher).

While this is not limiting if you have few active torrents (especially not if they fit in the RAM of the fileserver or torrent server) it is sort of an issue when you have 100 active torrents out of 600+ total.

[AceD]

I used to always use ruTorrent as my remote client of choice, very good imo.

[Ultra_Magnus]

Thanks for the suggestions, after fighting with macports for over an hour trying to get deluge installed on my mac, I went with transmission.  Transmission, with the remote gui, works really well and lets me just "open with" on my mac and automagically download onto my server, and apart from some confusion over ubuntu putting config files in nonstandard places, installation was easy.

I run uTorrent in wine. I guess that could be considered cheating.

Non cheating, just rather inelegant.

Well. I am running solaris, so I cannot use hdparm.

I thought solaris died years ago.

[temuchin]

Thanks for the suggestions, after fighting with macports for over an hour trying to get deluge installed on my mac, I went with transmission.  Transmission, with the remote gui, works really well and lets me just "open with" on my mac and automagically download onto my server, and apart from some confusion over ubuntu putting config files in nonstandard places, installation was easy.

ah i came across this thread a little late.  i also run a mac at home and while i got deluge installed locally it kept freezing up and crashing.  i have found excellent results with though with my seedboxes/servers running with Deluge Web Gui versus the aforementioned rTorrent which the Web Gui of that always froze up.

i am really curious about trying the transmission on a server.  i have only used that on my mac itself in the past.

[per]

I thought solaris died years ago.

No, not really. It just went open source.
http://openindiana.org/

It is way better for fileservers than Linux.

[risho]

I thought solaris died years ago.

No, not really. It just went open source.
http://openindiana.org/

It is way better for fileservers than Linux.

still way too close to being a walled garden for me, though running zfs in kernel space instead of userpsace would be interesting. i haven't looked too far into any of the *nix's other than linux and bsd. i don't see what purpose solaris serves. what can it do that linux and *bsd can't? but i digress.

i use deluge along with the webgui on my samba server, but after looking at all these suggestions for rtorrent i think i'm going to look into that. it looks really lean and interesting. i've messed around with transmission a bit but i could never get into it.