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Does torrenting slow down your computer? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm curious to know if anybody else finds their computer behaving sluggishly or erratically when downloading torrents.

For the record: I use transmission on a 2020 imac and have tried other clients to little avial. A virus and/or activity check doesn't reveal anything untoward going on in the background.

I'm not sure what's going on, but torrenting is either resource intensive (possibly RAM) or writing to the harddrive results in poor performance overall. Or maybe its something else (like my vpn draining resources)? Either way, when I torrent I might as well walk away from my computer because that's all it seems it wants to do, and even then its performance remains erratic.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

This depends a lot on the specifics of your torrents, your client, your OS, and your hardware configuration.

In the past I have suffered almost complete system lockups for extended periods because a combination of large torrents, qBittorrent, Windows, and low-speed HDDs caused huge IO locks. I could see in Task Manager that my HDDs were writing at full speed (still higher than my download speed, of course). Even when I had disabled the option to preallocate files, and even if I enabled the option to download sequentially, this still occurred. If you google around you can find similar reports tracing this behavior down to a limitation in libtorrent.

I have never encountered this issue on other OSes, and I'm not sure if this has been fixed; last time I encountered this was probably a couple years ago, and I haven't used Windows much since then.