For seeding the Fedora 10 release, I am using rTorrent on albaqarah & aalimraan (my two fastest servers), but I had to fall back to using the standard bittorrent client on alfaatihah because rTorrent isn’t available for its platform (RHEL3) – at least, not through yum nor up2date. rTorrent is great, in general, but it really let me down when I was trying to seed on aalimraan, because it kept crashing.
I had really wanted to seed the initial few hours of the release on my new server because of its great amount of network bandwidth, but that’s an opportunity I lost because of a crash like this:
Caught Segmentation fault, dumping stack: KB] [Port: 6924] [U 76/0] [D 0/0] [H 0/32] [S 3/86/768] [F 4/128]
0 rtorrent [0x41ea5d]
1 rtorrent [0x421488]
2 /lib64/libc.so.6 [0x3a76a322a0]
3 /usr/lib64/libtorrent.so.10 [0x3a78e4caf4]
4 /usr/lib64/libtorrent.so.10 [0x3a78e50683]
5 /usr/lib64/libtorrent.so.10 [0x3a78e4f704]
6 /usr/lib64/libtorrent.so.10(_ZN7torrent9PollEPoll7performEv+0x5d) [0x3a78e24d55]
7 rtorrent [0x440379]
8 rtorrent [0x41f645]
9 /lib64/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xfa) [0x3a76a1e32a]
10 rtorrent(_ZNSt8ios_base4InitD1Ev+0x49) [0x40cc79]
Aborted
that kept happening. Up to this point, I have never had a problem with rTorrent, alhamdulillaah, but still – that one time you really need it, and it goes? The worst part is, when searching the problems I was having, it was due to memory consumption. 4GB is not enough to seed a couple of hundred peers? I could seed almost 100 on my older hardware with only 1GB of RAM, and I never had the mainline client (which is written in Python) give me such problems. rTorrent is written in C++, which I thought would help with these kinds of cases. Shouldn’t, theoretically, a compiled application require less memory than one running within a virtual machine environment — maybe my understanding on computer science is lacking, but I always thought that was the prevailing wisdom.
Anyway, I didn’t want to turn this into a rant about rTorrent, but the emotions are strong enough to drive me to at least say something, especially because the crash happened during (my) nighttime, so I couldn’t restore the seeding until after I woke up and got back from fajr prayer.
If anyone has any recommendations on how to avoid the problem I had with rTorrent or on a better, more stable client that can handle such massive transfers and load, please let me know.