How to tune your connection settings

Sometimes I see people run all their torrents at unlimited number of connections. I used to do the same at first - until i noticed that the upload and download speeds began dropping suddenly, and the Torrenflux web interface became nearly unresponsive - sometimes taking 2 or 3 minutes to load a single page.

What was happening? Other servers on the same network were running fine at high speeds, why was my server starting to suck?

Server Load.

Torrentflux shows you the load of your server, right on the front page. If this gets very high it generally means the server is overloaded. What causes this? More often than not it is a sign that all the ram on the server is being used up. When your server has used up all its physical ram and starts using virtual ram, your upload and download speeds will suddenly drop. The server still has the bandwidth available to it, but it just can't put it to use.

Each server has 150Mb or 300Mb ram and 500Mb swap space (virtual ram). When a server uses up all its physical memory, it starts to use the hard drive instead - which is very slow. The server can quickly be brought to its knees this way.

One of the main causes of a server using up all its ram is too many connections. Try to keep your total connections down to around 40 or 50. (Twice as much if you have 300Mb ram.) To do this requires setting the Max Connections and/or Max Upload Connections settings for each torrent. The number of connections you need to set each torrent at depends on how many torrents you want to run at one time. Remember to restart each torrent after you change the Max Connections or the Max Upload Connection settings of that torrent.

Torrenflux is a powerful tool, and it takes some practice to pilot it at its full potential. If you invest the time to learn how to properly tune your seedbox, you will find your ratio will skyrocket and you will enjoy it much more.

 Update:

Setting the Max Connections only works for the Bittornado or the Mainline backend clients.  If you use the Transmission client, these settings will be ignored as this client doesn't support that feature.  Transmission will connect to as many as it can and must be controlled by Max Upload Speed and Max Download Speed settings.   There are many advantages to using Transmission however, as it has a much smaller memory footprint and is written in C++ and therefore is lean and mean compared to Bittornado or Mainline which are written in Python. 

If you have a bunch of torrents that you want to remain active and available to seed, but are not seeding constantly, Transmission is probably a good choice as it uses much less memory.  However, if you need more control you will want to use one of the other two - probably Tornado - although you need to run a lot less of them.