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If you wondered why your seedbox is slow, you came to the right place!
Explanation of performance
While running a seedbox, you may notice significant performance downgrade which can be determined by different reasons.
A typical performance issue usually related to one or more of the following aspects of your box:
- storage HDDs input/output operations
- CPU workload
- network transfer rate
- memory consumption
Sometimes they may appear in bundle and therefore generate synergy effect.
Important note!
Every regular, or non-dedicated, seedbox we provide runs in shared environment. That means a single host server has some limited amount of resources, and those resources are shared by several users concurrently. Please consider the specifics of shared hosting each time you get a performance issue as it may simply resolve by itself after a root cause ceased to exist.
Storage I/O
Seedboxes generate a lot of HDD operations and sometimes affect storage performance dramatically, yet temporally. While disk utilization is high, you may feel your box sluggish and unresponsive. Please have some patience, and it will surely stabilize at some acceptable grade. However, if it doesn’t cure itself for a while let our support operative know about that. We will measure the workload and try to handle it gently.
CPU workload
Your seedbox is run by modern server-grade processing unit which is capable of doing things fast in parallel. But there’re some demanding tasks that can set hard times to a CPU. Many users tend to execute heavy computations on their boxes, like media transcoding, file archiving, video streaming, etc. Such tasks may swallow all CPU power allocated to a seedbox and cause higher concurrency with other users, especially on cheaper plans like Fast or Quick. It surely won’t last forever, give it some time and the server will get back to normal soon. If CPU stay loaded for enormously long time and your seedbox feels unresponsive, it may appear a bad sign. Please report to our support operative.
Network transfer rate
Your seedbox may have lower download/upload speeds depending on the amount of data being sent or received by the host server. More data transferred cause bigger congestion of server’s uplink. Despite a 1 Gpbs network connection may seem pretty fast, it’s utilized by more than one user running different tasks. Simply wait for a while and the speed should normalize after those tasks are done. If a serious drop in network speed happens, we always get a report of this incident so we can respond and resolve it. If you experience slow networking for many hours or even days, a technical intervention may be required. Please report this to our support operative.
Memory consumption
This is the least possible to occur as each seedbox has it’s own allocated memory. RAM issues usually take place when a user overburdens his box with memory-demanding tasks and/or runs many processes. In majority of cases RAM can be easely freed by shutting down unnecessary application or by rebooting a seedbox.
If none of the above helped you can always request migration for your seedbox. Another server – another story! Our support agent will try to pick less populated node so you’ll have better overall performance in the end.
Seedbox statistics
To monitor your speeds for the past days, please use Statistics tab from your Control Panel and choose the time span from a few hours to a few days. It’s a good idea to check the speeds on a daily basis rather than in an hourly time span considering temporary fluctuations that happen during some hours of the day.
Demand and peering
A few other things that affect your speed outside our scope are the demand of the torrents and the peering from your tracker. Torrent speed increase/decrease in continuation of few days to a week is quite common. If you are seeding new torrents, the demand from peers is very high and the response of your bitTorrent client will be to connect and seed data as much as possible. After a few days, a lot of your peers will become seeders themselves thereby increasing availability and greatly decreasing demand.
Server downtime
One important factor from the tracker side is downtime of their servers. This may not mean complete unavailability of the tracker. A lot of times, only a few torrents experience peering issues for a few hours. Hardware used on servers have their own limits and handling hundreds, if not thousands of torrents daily will surely bring temporary issues to trackers.