NSLU (unslung) crashes with Transmission

[autodial]

Hello

I use Transmission with the NSLU2 (unslung on a USB stick) and a USB NTFS HDD, connected to USB Port 1. On the NSU i installed enhanced-torrent.

Actually it works. When i add a torrent via the Transmission GUI, it starts to download. The paths are set to the USB HDD. The download speed is very nice. So, it looks just great.

But, after a few seconds or minutes, i get disconnected from the NSLU. Until a reboot of th NSU i am not able to connect again. No SSH, no GUI, nothing...

There are two things which i am not sure about;

1. When i did "unslung" the NSLU2, i stopped the swap as described in the tutorial. Must i use now swap on the HDD? Is there a problem with heavy access?

2. I had some problems till i configured the paths correctly. Is it possible, that some datas get downloaded to the USB stick, and when it is full. the NSU crashes?

I installed Transmission by ipkg. So it should be the latest version. In the settings.json file i changed only the paths and disabled the whitelist.

Any ideas?

Thanks

[cfpp2p]

I maintain the transmission pages at:
http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/Unslung/Transmission

I recommend you get:
http://computerfixpro.com/transmission273p.zip
posted at Transmission 2.73+ on the NSLU2-Linux's site Unslung Transmission page.
all bug fixes and enhancements through current version 2.77+ (core) and 2.82+ (except rename)
and optimized for NSLU2.

Also see:
http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/HowTo/3 ... ithAUSBHub
My contribution there is Additional Notes by SRS:

You do need the swap. Transmission won't run correctly without it. Put the swap on the hdd or it can be on a seperate flash on a hub.
DON'T use ntfs, reformat to ext3.
I run transmission on UNSLUNG with complete stability and reliability with flash and hdd.

Have you overclocked the slug? http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/HowTo/OverClockTheSlug

Hope some of this helps.

[autodial]

Thanks for your help cfpp2p. I will follow your advises. I already formatted the HDD to ext3. But there is a problem to create the swap on the hdd. Anyway, i think, the best way is to re-flash the NSLU2, reformat the USB stick and create again the partitions and the necessary filesystem. Then, i unslung he device, start to install and configure it from new. May be for a professional it not would be necessary, but in this case its a good practice for me.

I hope it will be successful. Because, i like the design of the Transmission GUI. And the download speed was amazing....

I bought the device late. So it works already with 266Mhz (it shows me 263MHz). I guess then its nothing to more to do.

I will report the result, as soon I'm done.

[cfpp2p]

You should not have to reFlash the unit itself. Just format the flash back to ntfs, fat, delete all partitions on the flash or whatever -- so you can reUNSLUNG. I wouldn't advise a whole lot of reflashings as there can be a limit to how many times, but it may be a lot, but still don't do when unnecessary.

You should UNSLUNG to flash in disk port 2

You should native format the HDD in disk port 1 which will then put swap onto the hdd

[autodial]

Ok. The flash is formatted by the NSU. So, the flash and the hdd are got formatted by the NSU itself. What do you think, if I open a port for you, could you have a look at it? Now I am out. But I could prepare what would be necessary. So far, I formatted only the hdd over the web interface of the NSU. Since then, the NSU shows me the hdd under discs as public, instead hdd_1_1_1 as before, when the hdd was formatted with ntfs . Maybe now it would be possible to create the swap file on the hdd now. Before it looks OK, but I got a error message when I did access the hdd by winscp via ssh. To be honest, now I am little bit confused. After I formatted the hdd today, I tried to uninstall transmission and install it again by ikpg. But I got a error message... Something like, there are different transmissions s available. That's because I thought I should start from completely new.

[autodial]

So, now it works. Many thanks to cfpp2p. He was very helpful.

After i formatted the hdd to EXT3 (by the webinterface of the NSLU2) the device created by itself a swap file on the hdd. After re-install transmission, it worked.

So far i understand it

The only issue now is: The download speed is very inconsistent. The speed jumps from 2KB/s to 550KB/s and back. The average speed is somewhere at 20-30KB/s

I read here, that other users have the same issue. A reason could be, that the router is overwhelmed with so many connections. Obviously, a Windows OS limit these by itself.

I tried many different settings in settings.json, max-peers-global, peer-limit-global, peer-limit-per-torrent, encryption on or off, DHT on or off and different upload limits, with a 800MB torrent which i know which is very fast and stable. But still the same results. Yes, i did stop the Transmission daemon before i changed the settings.

May be, someone have a idea to solve this problem.

[cfpp2p]

May be, someone have a idea to solve this problem.

Since nslu2 is a small device first I would not have many torrents at once. So to find things out you might try as below to isolate the problem and also to determine the limits. Try just a single torrent to begin with.

Set with your GUI client of choice or edit settings.json directly. Remember to stop transmission before editing the settings file directly.

"dht-enabled": false
"lpd-enabled": false
"pex-enabled": false
"utp-enabled": false

"upload-slots-per-torrent": 1 (default is 14)


set your download and upload speeds to 80 percent of your maximum

"alt-speed-enabled": false
"speed-limit-down": -----> 80% of your maximum
"speed-limit-down-enabled": true
"speed-limit-up": -----> 80% of your maximum
"speed-limit-up-enabled": true

Go to http://torrent.ubuntu.com:6969/ and get a torrent with a very high complete(seeding) to downloading(leeching) ratio; such as currently http://torrent.ubuntu.com:6969/file?inf ... %C3s%1A%99 has 1880 seeders 21 leechers.

Start with just a single torrent and see if you still get the problem. Then try changing just one of the settings at a time until you reproduce and isolate the problem.

If you get the problem with a single torrent and the above setup I might think the problem is with your router, modem or ISP.

[autodial]

I did many tests with different settings. First, it seems that the settings from cfpp2p worked well. But not, anymore

Write now i download a torrent were the speed jumps between 800kb and 4kb. The same torrent with uTorrent on a win7 notebook runs stable with 1.7Mb. So i think, its not a router problem.

I tested also to set peer-limit-global to 10. Nothing changes.

May be the usb hdd needs a external power source. Who knows... When a torrent is running, filetransfer to the slug is almost impossible. Transferrate arounf 250kb. When the torrent is stopped, the speed is about 4.2MB.

[cfpp2p]

When a torrent is running, filetransfer to the slug is almost impossible. Transferrate arounf 250kb. When the torrent is stopped, the speed is about 4.2MB.

https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/1753

[cfpp2p]

I'm wondering if the speed jumps are latency with the GUI displaying the speed.

Can you give examples of good speed Torrent and average and then speed jump torrent and average?

[autodial]

When i start a torrent, which should permanently download with about 700Kb - 1.7Mb, the torrent drops to 12kb or even disconnect from the peer when it reaches about 400-600Kb. Then, the average speed is about 10-40Kb. The same torrent on uTorrent get an average speed about 900Kb - 1.3Mb.

Write now i download a 916MB .iso file. The speed is consistently between 250 - 320Kb. This looks very stable. It looks that the problem would start, when a peers are available with a higher transfer rate.

[cfpp2p]

OK, with permission I accessed autodial NAS, (thanks for the opportunity to test).

I find that the speed jumps are real in one case and a display issue only in another. Both not a problem caused by transmission or the NAS.



With a test torrent run over a 12 hour period. This is what I observed:


With a 10gb torrent and approximately 10 seeders and 50 leechers.

A certain "bitComet 1.0" peer from the country of Thailand would suddenly give a burst of 700kbs or more download speed for less than 5 seconds. The peer itself seemed faulty as indicated by the fact that over the 12 hour period this peer only increased from 97.0% done to 99.1% of the 10gb torrent equaling only 200mb of download. With transmission during the same period 7gb of data was downloaded. This indicates to me the bitComet client is not functioning well at all. This bitComet client gives high burst speeds but can not seem to download to itself at all well with any/all of the 10/50 seeders/leechers. In my opinion this case with speed jumps are real but not caused by transmission.

A second problem is the transmission rpc thread. The NAS is a low power 32mb ram 266mhz ixp4xx-based device. The GUI displays what the rpc reports but when very busy the results are latent incorrect/incomplete. This applies to the web client or other rpc clients as well:

Transmission-Remote-GUI
Notice the overall Down and Up speeds don't add up to the peers columns Down and Up speeds.


Sometimes we get the opposite effect where totals are less than columns


The NAS connected download speed limit tested to be 500kbs on average and tested approximately once per hour. An exception was a 1.2mbs but this returned to 500kbs the next hour's test.

An interesting thing was a second peer that gave 10 -15 second burst download of speed. This was a "libtorrent (Rasterbar) 0.15.0" client and interestingly also from the country of Thailand. I saw no other clients give speed burst other than these two. This speed bursting "libtorrent (Rasterbar) 0.15.0" client also showed a slow rate of completion as compared to transmission as observed over several hours.


Other torrents did not exhibit the speed jump at all. And several torrents downloading at once are steady in the display of download speed. It only seems to be the particular torrent that has these speed burst clients.

The same torrent with uTorrent on a win7 notebook runs stable with 1.7Mb.

I don't know about this until an actual recorded start and finish time for an identical torrent and the resulting calculated speed. The intermittent speeds displayed don't always reflect a true calculated speed. The speed tests I did were consistently 500kbs with the one exception of 1.2mbs.

When a torrent is running, filetransfer to the slug is almost impossible. Transferrate arounf 250kb. When the torrent is stopped, the speed is about 4.2MB.

I think this is a combination of:

https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/1753
and this:
The NAS is a low power 32mb ram 266mhz ixp4xx-based device.

[autodial]

Thanks a lot for your testings and report. Very interesting to read.

I keep the current settings and will observe the behavior.

[cfpp2p]

The speed tests I did were consistently 500kbs with the one exception of 1.2mbs

The conf for autodial network was toggled/reset through the nas GUI interface and then testing achieved 1mbs steady. Thankfully editing the settings directly or a full reset http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/HowTo/ResetSysConf was not necessary.

The limit for transmission download speed on NSLU2 unslung seems to be about 1.2mbs. Still at full 1mbs speed the nas is sluggish for transmission GUI, especially so if accessing remotely. Perhaps setting download speed to 80% or so of the maximum will alleviate this.

I keep the current settings and will observe the behavior.

autodial,
how is it working for you now?

referances
http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/HowTo/ResetSysConf
http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/HowTo/ChangeConfigBin
http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/HowTo/GetDHCPWorking