Why is my seedbox slow?

If you wondered why your seedbox is slow, you came to the right place!

Explanation of performance

While running a seedbox, you may notice a significant performance downgrade which can be determined by different reasons.
A typical performance issue is 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 bundles and therefore generate a synergy effect.

Important note!
Every regular, or non-dedicated, seedbox we provide runs in a 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 ceases 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 a modern server-grade processing unit that is capable of doing things fast in parallel. But there’re some demanding tasks that can set hard times for 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 the CPU stays loaded for an 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 causes bigger congestion of the server’s uplink. Despite a 1 Gbps 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 likely to occur as each seedbox has its own allocated memory. RAM issues usually take place when a user overburdens his box with memory-demanding tasks and/or runs many processes. In the majority of cases, RAM can be easily freed by shutting down unnecessary applications 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 nodes so you’ll have better overall performance in the end.

Seedbox statistics

To monitor your speeds for the past days, please use the 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 for the torrents and the peering from your tracker. Torrent speed increase/decrease in continuation of a 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 the downtime of their servers. This may not mean the complete unavailability of the tracker. A lot of times, only a few torrents experience peering issues for a few hours. Hardware used on servers has its own limits and handling hundreds, if not thousands of torrents daily will surely bring temporary issues to trackers.

Useful tutorials

• Get Started With Your Seedbox
• How to login to your Seedbox with FTP