High-Speed BitTorrent - A Look Inside the 1Gbps Seedbox

October 03, 2008 by sharky

Around here, we’re no strangers to seedboxes. If you’ve ever been privy to one, you’ll probably find it hard going back to regular home torrenting once you get accustomed to the download speed and seeding power. Well, that’s exactly what we’ll be facing next week when our TorrentSwift 1Gbps seedbox account expires. Alas, we’ll be downgrading back to our slow-as-molasses 100Mbps (mbit) seedbox where bandwidth is capped at a meager 12,500 KB/s (in a best-case scenario). But it sure was a fun ride while it lasted.

Let us share with you our torrenting experience with the next-generation 1Gbps port - most certainly this is the future of high-speed BitTorrent and already popular among many "pro" seeders. First of all, it’s somewhat difficult to fully grasp the concept of what 1Gbps really is. Take for example; if you have an above-average highspeed cable or DSL hookup at home, you’re probably getting download speeds of around 1.0 MB/s (on a 10Mbps plan). A 1Gbps connection is 100 times faster than that. Thus feasibly, you could download at 100MB per second; to put this in perspective a 700MB movie would take just 7 seconds to complete. This all sounds great on paper, but it doesn’t work like that - for two reasons: Firstly, most hardware (the hard disk in particular) isn’t able to read/write at that speed anyways, so you’re limited in that regard (although a workaround for this is to use SCSI drives/RAID configuration & whatnot). And secondly, you won’t be able to find anyone capable of seeding to you at that high a rate in order to maximize the throughput. After all, you can only download as fast as the swarm is uploading. We’ll get back to this later.

Perhaps we squandered our shot on a 1Gbps server by using the TorrentFlux-b4rt GUI. I can almost hear the screams from the Linux/rTorrent people who are reading this right now, knowing full well they could have done much, much better! Indeed true, but we weren’t aiming to do any serious ratio-buffering. Our focus was to find a great server with TorrentFlux already installed and ready-to-go as intended for the average (novice) seedbox user.

Only a handful of TorrentFlux seedbox retailers provide "available" 1Gbps-connected servers as part of their offered packages. Certainly, you could probably ask any of them to customize a plan, or get yourself one from LeaseWeb and install a torrent GUI yourself. For simplicity’s sake, we opted for a dedicated server with TFlux already installed from TorrentSwift.com.

TorrentSwift’s Dedicated TFlux Seedbox - The "Tiger 500"

There are two plans offered by TS that have a 1Gbps pipe, and that’s the Tiger 500 and the Tiger 600. Both are very impressive machines running on 8 GB RAM, but we couldn’t justify another $100 for the additional (but colossal) 750 GB hard drive space and the extra 5 TB monthly bandwidth transfer.

NOTE: As with most 1Gbps providers, the connection is not dedicated - this is shared over a few servers - so while it is possible to burst the full 1Gbps you are going to see better speeds during quieter off-peak hours. However, there is a 20,000 KB/s guarantee on these servers (at all times).

We opted for the $200 Tiger 500, and we were logged into it in under 24 hours. Money well spent! Here’s our take on some common myths and solutions to maximize speeds on a 1Gbps connection:

1Gbps Torrent Speeds, Testing and Optimization

As already mentioned, it’s highly unlikely to find a seeder who is capable of uploading at any sustainable rate in order for anyone to maximize the 1Gbps DL bandwidth on just one single torrent. There is no "50 MB/s torrent" - at least not that we found. Even if we were to get lucky and connect a dedicated 1Gbps seeder, it’s unlikely that it would be his/her only active torrent - thus the bandwidth would likely be watered down over a multitude of torrents anyways. For this, individual torrents seem to mimic the bandwidth behavior of a typical 100mbit seedbox, perhaps a little bit better. But it is the whole experience that puts 1Gbps to the test. You won’t see this screen on a 100mbit seedbox:

To properly utilize the bandwidth, we needed to add a LOT of torrents simultaneously (preferably large ones, since they complete so quickly), which is stressful on the server(load). That’s where a XEON Quad or Core2Quad comes in handily, coupled with 8 GB RAM (which we have). We pushed this beast into a serverload in excess of "25", and nothing broke. Server response appeared slightly slower, but speeds did not diminish and the ‘page refresh’ worked perfectly, although it lagged somewhat.

To be perfectly honest, we weren’t able hit the 50 MB/s mark (overall). Not that we tried all that hard, either. We steered clear of 100GB ‘ratio-busting’ torrents that would have downloaded for a much longer period of time, giving us ample opportunity to load in even more torrents. Nor did we necessarily choose the most popular (new) torrents, which would have resulted in more connections and larger swarms. We simply added a mixed bag of torrents (big and small, high-to-low seeded) to get an overall picture of what a typical user would be doing. The best speeds were able to come up with were somewhere in the high 20’s (almost 30,000 KB/s) during peak hours - still, quite a substantial improvement over a 100mbit seedbox.

Become a TFlux Seedbox Reseller

All things told, if you’re an incurable torrent freak who has some excess money, a 1gbps seedbox is the way to go. If $200 a month seems too much for you, remember, this is a dedicated server - it’s yours and yours alone! You’ll be able divide the server into sub accounts for rental (reselling), which is really simple to do through the TorrentFlux interface. The main advantage here is that with 8 GB RAM and a shared 1Gbps pipe, you’ll be able to split it up into several accounts and keep everyone happy, and perhaps even turn yourself a tidy profit (plus a free seedbox).

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