rtorrent is a great piece of software, and with patches from the rtorrent-ps project it’s even better. Seeding many torrents, I started noticing harddrive lockups every now and then, where the program wouldn’t respond until I forcefully removed the usb cable to one of my drives.

Figuring it could be that the drive itself was running bad, I just lived with the issue for a while. Upon accident, I stumbled upon an issue that looked relevant.

Although some people think it could be an dns issue, some people also reports that:

It seems to happen when the session directory is being updated.

Turns out that rtorrent saves all the sessions every 20 minutes by default. With a large amount of torrents this can be a disk performance hog.

I tried to increase the interval to 12 hours instead:

~/.rtorrent.rc

schedule2 = session_save, 1200, 43200, ((session.save))

and I’ve had zero lockups or crashes since then.

Current situation looks like this:

img

1.5 GiB + 1.8 MiB = 1.5 GiB rtorrent main

which is pretty darn good I must say.