After getting KDE and Samba to work, I started looking out for a good BitTorrent client. Those MythBusters episodes aren’t gonna download themselves and I was already showing the first signs of Top Gear Withdrawal Syndrome (TGWS) 
What I was looking for was a fast downloading client that used little resources and that I could run in the background as a service or daemon. I had tried MLDonkey on Windows Server 2008, but it was quite a pain to get set up right and torrent download speeds weren’t all that great (plus some trackers have actually banned MLDonkey). Azureus has a textmode GUI that I could theoretically combine with a WebUI plugin, but that would still be a bit too heavyweight.
That’s when I discovered rTorrent. It runs in the console (and thus, you can run it with DTACH) and can be controlled via a simple XMLRPC interface. And then there’s wTorrent, a nice-looking, nifty Web 2.0 AJAX GUI written in PHP that you can run in Apache or lighthttpd. I’m now running a daemonized rTorrent with the wTorrent GUI and it’s working so well it’s almost too good to be true 
BitTorrent Performance
Now I have tried µTorrent, Azureus, Halite, BitComet, MLDonkey und some more, double checked that I had opened the required ports (using nmap from a server on the internet), used random ports >50,000 to avoid throttling, tweaked my settings and what not, but download speeds were, at best, average.
I left rTorrent running overnight with a 7 GB download. One that had somehow caused my Windows Server 2008 system to commit suicide by paging in no time, or that would complete but still have missing chunks. After one night, the torrent was at 60%, the next day it was finished. And that’s no exception.
RAID / Samba Performance
I reported a stable 20 MB/s upload in my last post. Forget that, it’s a stable 40 MB/s now that I’ve got no compile or torrent rehash running in the background. And download speeds are at a stable 60 MB/s — I believe that’s pretty close to what the hard drive I’m downloading to can do.
This is just incredible. It’s still the same hardware, but the new system could run circles around my old setup.
July 26th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
From when I dabbled in Linux, Gentoo is the way I went too. Though it is supposed to be the ricer OS… I found the community on the forums and documentation to be just awesome.
July 28th, 2008 at 8:51 am
Same here. I actually ran Debian on the very server hosting my blog in the past, but it all went horribly wrong when I decided to install PHP5 - which had no official package yet at that time.
I’d love to see how Windows Server 2008 runs for other people. But not even the company I work for is using it yet.
While linux seems grossly unpolished and keeps nagging me with its inconsistency and little lapses, its core seems to be incredibly well designed. All unallocated memory is used for caching, just like in Windows, but it has never paged out a running program - in fact, I have never seen it even touch the swap partition.
And windows then (you saw that 180° comparison coming, didn’t you :p) appears very polished and gives the feeling of a well engineered architecture on the outside. But then things break on the most basic level. Hung processes that cannot be killed, the disk cache eating the system to death and things breaking out of the blue.