Which Bittorrent client should I use with Torrentflux?
This is a really great question, and it has a fairly simple answer.
You should use Transmission whenever possible.
We have three clients installed on all the seedboxes for you to choose from: Transmission, BitTornado, and Mainline (the original bittorrent client). Azureus is not installed on our seedboxes. Transmission uses the least amount of memory of all the Torrentflux clients. When less memory is used by your Bittorrent client, more memory is available for your seedbox to do other things – like downloading and seeding more torrents.
Transmission uses much, much less memory than Mainline or BitTornado. That is why your default client is set to Transmission when you get your new seedbox. If you do choose to run BitTornado or Mainline, you should expect to run less than five torrents at a time, because your memory will be used up very quickly, and your seedbox is likely to lock up and become unresponsive.
Transmission, on the other hand, uses memory much more efficiently.
Whatever your choice in this area, it would be very wise for you to keep an eye your seedbox memory statistics. If your seedbox starts to use more than a handful of megabytes of swap space, your server will quickly become unable to seed at high speeds because it is using virtual memory (saved on the hard disk); its actual physical memory (ram) has run out. Your seedbox will begin working very hard to function at 100%, and it will fail to do so. Your server will not be able to get the information from the hard disk to the network card fast enough and you will be unable to take advantage of the fact that your seedbox is on a 100mbit connection. This is called "thrashing" and Wikipedia has a fairly detailed explanation if you are interested in more info on this.
Bottom line: use Transmission if possible.
The exception becomes apparent when you do not want to download an entire torrent, but just some individual files from the torrent. For example, if you ran into a torrent that featured the five most recent versions of a Linux operating system, but you only wanted the most recent one and not the other four, you should use Bittornado. Transmission doesn't (yet) allow you to partially download a torrent, but Bittornado does. This is when you should use Tornado… but in all other instances, use Transmission.
Try it. You'll like it. Leave your thoughts in the comments – we think you'll find that your seedbox performs at its best with Transmission.
As always, have fun.
//Seedbox Hosting Team//
