Why torrents pause automatically?

[gstadler]

Hi,

I am running transmission 1.32 on an asus wl500gp router. Everything seems to work normally, except that torrents are regularly paused after 1 or 2 hours, sometimes sooner. When this happens, I have to resume manually on the web interface and they continue normally until they pause again. I do not see anything special in the syslog, but maybe a special transmission log is there somewhere? Also is there a way to check status from a shell script and to send commands to the daemon from the script instead of the web interface?

[Waldorf]

You can use the transmission-remote (which is either also installed on your asus, or you can run it remotely from your pc), which will indeed allow you to check status, and more.

I'm not sure why those torrents get paused, though. You can run transmission-daemon in debug mode, which will likely dump it to the console.

[gstadler]

I have tried to run the 1.32 daemon in debug mode, but -d and --debug switches do not work. However, there is the -f switch for foreground mode where some log is printed. Is it supposed to be the debug mode as well?

[Waldorf]

Ah, yes. Foreground mode is 'debug mode'.

[gstadler]

I have managed to get the logs during an 'automatic' torrent pause:

1) transmission log says:
generic i/o errno from errno: Operation now in progress

2) At the same time, the syslog has an entry:
Aug 19 03:26:27 kernel: attempt to access beyond end of device
Aug 19 03:26:27 kernel: 08:03: rw=0, want=449970180, limit=384057922
Aug 19 03:26:27 kernel: EXT3-fs error (device sd(8,3)): read_block_bitmap: Cannot read block bitmap - block_group = 3433, block_bitmap = 112492544

So, this seems to be a temporary error in accessing my attached USB drive, from which transmission does not recover automatically but puts torrents in 'pause' state.

[Waldorf]

May I ask, is your disk formatted as FAT? And are the files you're trying to download larger than 4 GB?

[theCrank]

Maybe the disk is full?

[gstadler]

Hi,

The size of the torrent is 4.38 GB. The error occurs right after beginning as well, when only a small part is downloaded. The disk partition is formatted as a Linux EXT3 file system and it is not full, has some 100 GB free. When I click resume on the web interface the torrent continues normally for a few hours then it is paused again because of the same disk error. I have already managed to complete torrents this way, but I had to 'resume' manually a lot. The problem however does not occur during seeding, only downloads are paused.

[theCrank]

What about...

...defective filesystem?
...defective disk?

[gstadler]

The file system was gradually more and more corrupted due to some unnoticed power outages on the router, which rebooted frequently without unmounting the file systems on the usb disk. Transmission was right to pause the torrents, because it encountered a disk error which can be seen in the syslog.

[theCrank]

Nice... Problem solved. And: I got something to add to the Wiki.
Can you supply me with your logs? I'd like to post them.

[gstadler]

Hi,

What is relevant in the logs can be seen in one of my earlier posts in this thread. Transmission log was really one line only, which were related to the pause the rest was standard stuff. The real info was in the syslog entries which are also there in the post.

[theCrank]

Ok, thanks!

[SickStiff]

Very strange. I have the same problem with 3 torrents, but the funny thing is that 5 other torrents, which are being saved on the same external harddisc as the 3 torrents that keep getting paused, are downloading without any problem. The disc (formatted as Mac OSX Journaled) is not corrupted and there's more than 300 GB still free. Anyone an idea?

[Superjunior]

I also have this problem. Random torrents (what it seems like) pause themselves some time after the download is complete, even though the seed limit haven't been reached. When I restart the seeding manually, it just starts without any problems, error messages or such.

Any clues?

(Running Snow Leopard and latest Transmission)