Completely going the CLI Way - rTorrent - a Review…
I have already written about my experiences with other torrent managers and rTorrent in this series before in this post. Now I am set to review rTorrent because, believe it or now, I am actually using it as my primary torrent manager for past 1 month. Don’t worry… I am not going to write a “1 month with rTorrent” here. I am going to review it in short for performance and how to optimize it to use it better. I will start with a short review of rTorrent.
rTorrent - Review
As I said, after using it for a whole month, I am beginning to like it and also getting a little anxious for future releases. As already mentioned, I had many problems with other torrent clients. You can read more about them here. And then came the day when I decided to take a brave step and use a client that is completely based on *nix console. I am happy to say that I, in no way, regret that decision.
Things started with little bumps along the way. I had to do a little research on the site of rTorrent and find some settings which would work on my system. Then I began downloading.
I was immediately surprised with 2 things. First was that even though there were go GUI tools, rTorrent never felt like a bad software. With the help of nCurses, the interface has been turned into a crisp UI that actually works. If you want eye candy then rTorrent is not for you, but if you long for usability, then rTorrent does the trick for you. I like it a lot.
Second thing was the amount of RAM and CPU it used. It was too low. I even ran it on a Celeron, 500MHz 96MB SD-RAM pc and I was astonished to see the same responsive piece of software. The main reason behind the less use of RAM is that it is built using C++ and that there is no GUI to take care of. It runs ablaze.
Next part was speed. I am happy to say that, even though it does not improve the speeds, it matches with the speeds that you get using uTorrent or Azureus. The main thing that came next was the hash table (DHT). When I started, there was no DHT in rTorrent (0.7.x) but now with 0.8.0 version DHT is there. It quotes on the site,
Requires libTorrent/rTorrent version 0.12.0/0.8.0 or higher (or SVN revision 1013).
There is an extensive guide about use of DHT in rTorrent and it can be found here. So, now it only remains to be seen if it has a better DHT than uTorrent or not. Frankly, I am not aware of it yet if rTorrent performs better with DHT than uTorrent. Next up, it also has Super Seeding, Peer Exchange and Encryption. But it lacks some things like a tracker and uPnP support.
Pros :-
- Extremely low on resources.
- Good speeds.
- Torrent resuming is good.
- Has DHT, Peer Exchange, Super Seeding, Encryption, Scheduler.
Cons :-
- Lacks some functions like tracker, uPnP support.
- Does not have a queue (to be implemented in future release).
- If the internet disconnects for a time and resumes later, the torrents do not start downloading automatically till tracker time is finished.
This last problem is a major one for people like me living in countries like India where power cuts are more frequent than sunrise and sunsets. Even a slight glitch makes rTorrent wait an hour before resuming downloads on trackers that are updated every hour. Except for this, the queuing must be implemented as soon as one can. There exists a script to enable queuing in rTorrent, like a plugin. But it is not native with rTorrent and there are no guaranties.
Tuning rTorrent for Performance
Now it is time for tuning up that rTorrent of yours and make it behave exactly the way you want it to.
Obtaining rTorrent :-
You can get the source of both stable and unstable rTorrent and libtorrent from the rTorrent website. There are links to obtain binaries for openSUSE, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora also. You can get them here.
Configuring rTorrent :-
There is a file called .rtorrentrc. This file contains all the preferences that you set for rTorrent. Unfortunately, there is no GUI for any of settings in rTorrent. So, you have to edit this file manually and set the options yourself. The rc file however has extensive help on all the preferences and you will never feel like you don’t know what a setting does. You can get the sample rc file from here. Then you can uncomment the (remove the preceding # from the line) line and set the option. You need to place the file with name ‘.rtorrent.rc’ in your home directory. Once you do that, you edit the file and launch rTorrent. Furthur things are very easy.
Using rTorrent :-
The global keybindings can be found here. The guide on that site is more than extensive and quite useful so I am saving myself some typing work. I couldn’t have done better than those guys. Once you do that you have to create some directories and reflect them in the rtorrent.rc file. It is the watch directory and the sessions directory. The watch directory saves the torrents that you download in itself and the sessions directory saves the information about the state of torrents being download. It helps in reducing the hash checking every-time you start rTorrent.
You can find detailed information and a guide here. Again, they have done a splendid job and I am saving myself the work.
GUI for the **** :-
I cannot find the word that I am looking for. So, if you can find it, please post it in the comments below. There are few web-based GUI’s written by people to use rTorrent with it. I am listing a few here.
- nTorrent - An rTorrent GUI
- rtGui - a PHP/Web interface for rTorrent using XML-RPC
- wTorrent - a php/xhtml web interface for rTorrent
- rTWi - an rTorrent Web interface
- rtorstat - rTorrent status webpage generator : rtorstat does not require xmlrpc support, but, instead, it uses the saved session data in order to create the status page. Therefore, it is a much simpler implementation with very limited features.
Well thats it people. I think now you will be able to use rTorrent like a pro and I am sure you will be very happy with it. Especially if you have an old PC then rTorrent is the way to go. Try it out and please do share your experiences here.
Links
Posts in the series, Going the CLI Way :-
This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 at 3:03 pm and is filed under Bit-Torrent, Console, HowTo, Internet, Linux, Review, Software, Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Aditya November 10th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
I am thinking of writing more posts… did Chinmay tell you about the CLI project of mine with a friend? Let’s see when it will finish… Will disclose details when I am done with it, if I am done with it.