Transmission on Amahi server

zack1uk · 7 Jun 2011 at 19:05

Does anyone use this?

I find that when I have the transmission server running it kills my connection for anything else, even when using the speed limiter. Even a limit 10kB/s DL, 1kb/s UL limit (unlimited it will run at up to 550 kb download, 40kb upload) massively slows down all other internet traffic and completely stops me from logging into online games.

My limited knowledge suggests that its dominating the number of allowable connections, but don't know how to limit this or even where to actually limit it (I seem to have a transmission service and a transmission-daemon service, normally only the later is running) . I used to use Utorrent on Windows Home Server and it was as easy as pie.

I've tried QOS in my Linksys W320N modem router to no avail.

Any ideas, or suggestions much appreciated.

Hairybudda · 7 Jun 2011 at 20:56

How is your QoS set up? How is your network set up? Are you running DD-WRT on the W320N (the router itself is fine unless you're seeing hundreds of busy torrents with DHT on)?

zack1uk · 7 Jun 2011 at 22:12

Cheers

Its a WAG320N modem router so DDwrt is not available, to the best of my knowledge.

I have QoS set up to give the port that transmission uses, and also the server (by MAC address) low priority. All connections on any port to my main PC (via its mac address) as high priority. I've also tried adding the ports that my games (was WoW, but now Rift and World of Tanks) high priority.

I'm sure its not the router but something in the transmission config, as it worked fine under the old WHS / UTorrent setup. I had similar problems with Utorrent, but once I had reduced the number of connections it used and throttled its overall upload and download bandwidth it worked a treat.

Edit: Network fully wired (Gb), I'm usually only downloading one or 2 at a time, but often have up to 20 seeding. They all pretty old (non copyright) ones, so not always popular but enough of a trickle to keep my ratios up and the combined upload speeds often don't use the full bandwidth. My upload speed is always limited to circa 80% of upload bandwidth. The strange thing is that even when there is only 5kb/s of uploads and no downloads I get the problem. As soon as I kill the service, problem disappears.

Hairybudda · 7 Jun 2011 at 22:47

Oh damn, thought it was the WRT320N and not the WAG. What's the hardware like inside(RAM/ROM/CPU)?

zack1uk · 7 Jun 2011 at 23:10

In the server: I don't remember exact CPU, its one of the low energy (4850be??) AMD Athlon AM2 CPUs, 2 gig Ram.
I've done a bit of googling to find out whats inside the linksys, but not really getting many detailed specs apart from the wireless bits and bobs, which I'm fairly sure aren't relevant.

However, I did find this post which seems to indicate that the router can only handle up to 100 or so connections before it starts to fall over. Which kind of explains why the WHS / Utorrent combo was fine as I could manually limit the number of connections used:
http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=674521

Looks like I may have to upgrade to Amahi 6 and install Utorrent

Hairybudda · 7 Jun 2011 at 23:47

To be fair it sounds like your router is the issue here, why not just ditch transmission and use rtorrent + rutorrent? It's lighter and a bit more configurable plus you can disable peer exchange and DHT

JimAroo · 8 Jun 2011 at 09:02

another vote for rtorrent, it's as efficient and as lightweight as you can get for a torrent client.

zinc · 9 Jun 2011 at 01:28

I get his exact problem with every torrent application on ubuntu. My internet upload speed is not good, uploading anything over 25kb/s and my internet comes unusable, especially during peak times so I set a limit. No matter what I do it never limits the upload speed. It reports it in the torrent application that it's running at the limit set however network tools report it as always over 50kb/s. There seems to be always a 50kb/s overhead for me. eg if I set a upload limit to 10kb it will really be uploading at 60kb/s etc.

Also QoS and forwarding ports on the router have never helped.

zack1uk · 9 Jun 2011 at 08:22

Hairybudda said:
To be fair it sounds like your router is the issue here, why not just ditch transmission and use rtorrent + rutorrent? It's lighter and a bit more configurable plus you can disable peer exchange and DHT

Yep, indeed, my router is the issue and it can't handle more than 100 connections it seems, thus why I was asking originally if anyone knew how to restrict the number of connections that Transmission uses.

Cheers for that I've had a look at RTorrent but dismissed it because, being a linux noob I wanted a client with a GUI and also that could be run on a headless server; RuTorrent (which I wasn't aware of) seems to allow this, so thanks, but it doesn't seem to be able to limit the number of connections either so it won't help. Or am I missing something?