[CentOS] OT: Torrent software choice

Thu Apr 2 23:49:54 UTC 2009
Michael A. Peters <mpeters at mac.com>

Spiro Harvey wrote:
> On Thu, 2 Apr 2009 18:41:33 -0400
> Robert Spangler <mlists at zoominternet.net> wrote:
>> So what is everyone using for their torrent?
>> What is the best?
> 
> amusing. There is no such thing as the "best", only the best fit to your
> needs.
> 
> For a start, what front end do you want? gnome, kde, tcl, cli, cli with
> curses, web based? Do you want it to disappear in your system tray? do
> you want to feed it into screen so you can log back into it at work and
> review its status? do you want to have the status pasted in a section
> of conky?
> 
> Anybody who tells you what is "best" is just telling you their
> favourite, which is almost always useless information. 

I use the standard torrent client in EPEL via a shell script.

mkdir /src/torrent/{active,nonactive}

(owned by my standard user)

this shell script in ~/bin

#!/bin/bash
# ~/bin/bt.sh
[ -f /tmp/lock_bt ] && exit 0
[ -f ~/lock_bt ] && exit 0
running="`/bin/ps aux |/bin/grep launchmany |/bin/grep "python" |wc -l`"
if [ $running -lt 1 ]; then
pushd /srv/torrent > /dev/null 2>&1
/bin/date >> date.log
nohup /usr/bin/launchmany-console active/ > torrent.log &
popd > /dev/null 2>&1
fi

-=-
Then I have this in my crontab:

02,07,12,17,22,27,32,37,42,45,47,52,57 * * * * sh /home/mpeters/bin/bt.sh

Every 5 minutes it runs - and does nothing if already running.
When I want to start a new torrent - I just throw the torrent in 
/srv/torrent/active/

When I no longer want to run that torrent - I move the .torrent file 
into /srv/torrent/nonactive

Works well except there seems to be a memory leak in the EPEL torrent 
client - sometimes the system becomes sluggish and cpu usage spikes. 
Killing the client returns the system to zippy - and it automagically 
starts again within 5 minutes.

I may modify the above script to kill the client when the system load 
average is high - as that will take care of the leak problem for me and 
prevent it from running when I'm intentionally pounding the system.

Anyway - that has worked swell for me for years, other than the memory 
leak issue.

When I want to see the progress of a torrent -

tail -f /src/torrent/torrent.log

That file can get rather large, but it is wiped clean whenever the 
client is started.