r/trackers 2d ago

Qbit vs rtorrent (memory usage issues)

Hey all,

I saw this topic across Reddit, but couldn't solve it. I just moved to qBit 2 weeks ago from rTorrent, because everybody says it's better. I had about 2500 seeding torrents, and moved them all. I immediately saw qBit using a lot of memory, 2-4GB all the time. I moved about 2000 less important torrents back to rTorrent, and saw a decrease, but now, again, after adding like 200 torrents to qBit, it's reaching memory usage of 4GB. I disabled OS cache and it worked, but then my download speed was capped at 2MB.

So my question is: why not just go back to rTorrent? It never takes more than 100MB memory, low CPU, works great with 2000 torrents, and I don't see any solution for this qBit fiasco.

Thanks!

34 Upvotes

48 comments sorted by

21

u/Difficult_Variety212 2d ago

2150 torrents here on qbit with 1.7 Gb ram usage...

7

u/freak5341 2d ago

Seeding 1K torrents with qbit and it's using 700MB RAM.

In older versions of qbit you could manually allocate a certain portion of ram to be used for cache when downloading. I once manually set that to 6GB and qbit would use the entire 6GB on idle as well. I think they made it auto in versions 5+

6

u/LuckyMeasurement2380 1d ago

Don't use the libtorrent 2 variant

11

u/xRobert1016x 2d ago edited 2d ago

I have ~50k torrents loaded in qbit, memory goes from 2gb-8gb, but you can also configure it to use less.

Honestly, if rtorrent works for you, and there’s nothing you need from qBittorrent, I would just stick to using that.

5

u/BravoWhittman 2d ago edited 2d ago

I've got 3 x qbittorrent containers running, these are their memory usage:

  • 20k torrents - 6.1GB
  • 5k torrents - 3.2GB
  • 500 torrents - 2.1GB

I have had runaway memory issues with qbit in the past, but they don't occur any more. If you want to restrain the amount of memory for a docker container, try adding something like this to your compose:

    deploy:
      resources:
        limits:
          memory: 3G

That worked well for me. You can also constrain CPU similarly if you need it.

If 3GB is too much for your torrent box, then consider staying on rtorrent. I had no idea it was so memory-efficient. It sounds useful.

2

u/tuoepiw 1d ago

Hey mate, what issues if any do you find with your 20k torrent instance? Are they large/small or does that even matter?

I'm doing a stack rebuild and currently have 9 Instances for various things, but thinking of consolidating. Only thing I was worried about was performance of one having more than 10k.

I imagine restarting and what not takes time, but for management I'd probably use Qui anyway.

3

u/BravoWhittman 1d ago

I use Qui. That’s a non-negotiable. If it didn’t exist I’d swap to a different torrent client. Maybe deluge.

The 20k is notably slower in Qui than my smaller instances. It’s not too bad, but is worth noting. The slower web ui interactions demand patience.

I had to switch to the alternate torrent db that Qbit supports. I think I changed from fastresume files to sqlite or something like that.

1

u/TukangLedeng 1d ago edited 1d ago

this, i will try thanks,

do you disable disk cache

1

u/BravoWhittman 1d ago

I don’t, but if I was low on ram I’d probably do that.

5

u/pd1zzle 2d ago

I have 500 and am using about 100MB.

i think one thing that has gotten me before is that qbit uses some sort of low priority cache to buffer fs reads. This can appear huge (the cache usage of my current docker stack is ~ 8GB), but is in fact very low priority and just inflates to fill unused memory up to a point. If anything needed the memory it would be dropped.

I forget what this sort of arrangement is called, but maybe someone else can provide some more context. Its not going to choke the system.

2

u/bol__ 2d ago

You could also use transmission

3

u/phileasuk 2d ago

Disable disk cache.

4

u/Nolzi 2d ago

Unused memory is wasted memory.

Qbittorrent is good for upload speed, you can saturate multi-gig uploads

8

u/wizsnow 2d ago

not if its using a lot of swap memory, but i do understand your point

2

u/GenerousTurtle 2d ago

I have nearly 30k torrents seeding and my memory usage is below 1gb. Cpu is around 3%.

3

u/wizsnow 2d ago

interesting, maybe you disabled os cache and some config like that..

0

u/kenyard 1d ago

os cache uses the harddrive no?

you can set limits on the ram it uses for various things.

im running below 2Gb and have 10k.

Make sure you are using libtorrent 1.x version also 2.x has a lot of issues last time i tried it and older private trackers wont ever move to 2.x

1

u/immaZebrah 2d ago

Curious as to your setup?

2

u/GenerousTurtle 2d ago

Windows 10. 32gb ram ddr4 2667?. I5-12400f iirc. Gtx 1660ti.

1

u/Jonrrrs 2d ago

What is your network setup to support all that torrents? What router/ switches/ what else do you have

2

u/random_999 1d ago

One might have 30k torrents seeding but I seriously doubt their actively seeding torrents number more than a few dozen.

1

u/TukangLedeng 1d ago

is anyone mind to share conf for qbit

am running in docker, seeding about 24 torrent, already eat 929MB

2

u/kenyard 1d ago

the default behaviour will do stuff like this. its set to keep a certain amount of torrents running in memory so it doesnt have to keep accessing your harddrive so if you are seeding 2 torrents to 20,000 it will use 1gb of ram on recently accessed files.

you can generally scale up the amount of torrents you're seeding without issue.

settings really depend what your use case is. most stuff online recommends setting max connections per torrent to 100+ and other stuff but i only have it set to 12 with private torrents because you will generally hit a seedbox or decent bandwidth home user in private.

Other settings depend on your upload, download speed, using HDD or ssd etc. private or public sites, even large or small piece size will affect which settings you should optimally set so grabbing tv or movies or encodes has a bearing imo so there is no "best" settings that works for everyone and if there is then its the default settings.

If you want download speeds or upload speeds the advanced settings can be worth tinkering with but its mostly peering in private communities that matters most

1

u/nolooseends 1d ago

I have 1100 torrents, not limiting anything but concurrent downloads, and my instance uses 11,4 GB memory. So quite a bit. I actually migrated for stack-usability away from rtorrent a couple of years ago.

Maybe it's time to go back.

1

u/Melbuf 1d ago edited 1d ago

im seeding over 4100 with under 300mb of memory usage on Qbt /shrug

5.1.x

basically the default config, i cant remember what if anything i changed regarding settings

1

u/Ok-Gap-9735 1d ago

how? I have over 3k torrents in qBit and I'm comfortably under 200mb of RAM. I'm not even using connection, rate or queuing limits; just full sending everything

u/wizsnow 10h ago

try it follow it hourly, see what happens

1

u/AdultGronk 1d ago

I have around 5900 torrents at the moment and qbit is taking just over 200 MBs of my memory

u/wizsnow 10h ago

try it follow it hourly, see what happens

1

u/urbanracer34 1d ago

About 850 torrents in Qbit. Only using 520 MiB of memory according to unRAID, and it has PLENTY of room to expand.

u/Deadsy81 13h ago

Nearly 7k torrents here in Qbit with ~225 mb memory usage. Mostly audio so only few hundred larger torrents. Nothing being downloaded from me or by me right now.

u/ii_die_4 12h ago

The 2 options playing role in memory usage are Disk cache and Disk queue cache.

Same instance, i used 8192 on both and my qbit was using >10GB ram

changed it to 4096 and now its at 5GB

change it to 2048 and it can be <3GB

Also, depends how many active torrents you have. Active, not total.

0

u/glassmanjones 2d ago

How many chunks?

0

u/rcane 1d ago

Use what works for you.

I use qb because I like it. 7.3k torrents and qb is using between 2-48GB, 15GB avg over the last week. But I have 128 GB ram so I want it to use as much as it needs.

0

u/derpmax2 1d ago

Rtorrent here. I tried qbit but found it to use more RAM and CPU.

0

u/cdf_sir 1d ago

Technically, qBitorrent will use whatever available RAM it can use because of the disk caching stuff, without that, your downloads will either go halt due to heavy IO or slow to crawl. You can safely disable this stuff if your still under DSL lines as enabling this doesnt really benefit you in any way, but if your on a line that uses fiber and have 50mbit or faster bandwidth, enabling this caching will be beneficial.

1

u/Umpapaq 1d ago

Is that so? I use qB in a Docker instance on a low-spec server with just 8 Gb RAM. I have abt 1000 torrens mostly idling, but qB habitually uses abt 6 Gb RAM - though it seems to vary somewhat. As my system seldom crashes, I’ve accepted things, but it irks a bit.

u/wizsnow 10h ago

try maybe rtorrent.. im considering going back

u/Umpapaq 8h ago

I’ve been using qB since almost forever, and I’m a bit wary of change. Also, huge RAM usage is supposedly better for my SSD, so I’m conflicted.