Qbittorent excessive heating PC and upload choking

[UsmanTariq2]

qBittorrent & operating system versions

WIndows 11 Qbittorent 4.6.5 libtorrent 2.0 i7 8700k 8gb NVME

What is the problem?

These are general observations that i have made that the appropriate person may identify

Using a qbittorent on a i7 8700k Laptop the laptop heats up excessively when running qbittorent vs other torrent clients such as transmission or bittorent. In general, i have found that qbittorent uses excessive resources which is in general not good for people with older devices

Qbittorent chokes the upload to such a point that the entire connection starts slowing down vs other torrent clients. For example, if i want to watch a twitch stream and upload some torrents, on a modest ISP connection qbittorent somehow makes the downloading slower ( isp is symmetrical speeds) whereas running other clients keep it smooth.

Now i know this is not a technical observation, but still worth investigating in general . Both of these are critical for qbittorent windows for being a usable client.

Steps to reproduce

Already mentioned

Additional context

No response

Log(s) & preferences file(s)

No response

[Pentaphon]

libtorrent 2.0

try the version with libtorrent 1.2.19 and report back

[UsmanTariq2]

Will do. This will be the nightly version from the CI builds or the stable version on the website? Edited: Looked up . Its the stable version

[UsmanTariq2]

Ran stable 4.6.5 with libtorrent 1.2 .Everything same Modest 35-70 seeding torrents. As you can see thats a lot of resources, especially disk, for just a idle computer with seeding only. Uploading speeds do not account for the excessive CPU usage as its modest

Qbittorent internal settings are all close to default pretty much. As you can see its unusable on a modest machine.

Tixati and bittorent all work normally with the same machine at normal heat giving ranges. and consuming a lot less resources .

[HanabishiRecca]

What answer exactly do you expect?

Qbittorent chokes the upload to such a point that the entire connection starts slowing down vs other torrent clients.

Isn't more seeding = the client does its job better? If high upload rates bother you - limit the upload speed. You can also lower connection numbers in Connections Limits category. Or enable Torrent Queueing and set Maximum active uploads.

[UsmanTariq2]

The upload choking should be mitigated as default. In my opinion, it has to do with the some combination of code rather settings like connection limits and torrent queuing. If it is the settings, they should be tweaked to default to the stabler config.

I have turned those up in other clients historically and it still works fine. Excuse the vagueness but i hope i get my point across

[HanabishiRecca]

Very arguable. Many people use the client for heavy seeding on dedicated machines and want to utilize the bandwidth as much as possible.

And even if we go that path, qBittorrent already supports traffic prioritization, it's up to your network devices and ISP to respect that. Also uTP protocol itself has some dynamic bandwidth allocation. What else do you want?

Detecting the actual connection properties reliably isn't really possible unfortunately. Also problems are often not in speeds, but in high connection count. Cheap routers could choke already at hundred connections. Some ISPs limit number of connections too.

If you suggest to tweak the defaults, to what values exactly? People have very different network setups and speeds. It is literally impossible to come up with defaults fitting for everyone. That's why they exist as tunable settings in the first place.

[UsmanTariq2]

And even if we go that path, qBittorrent already supports traffic prioritization, it's up to your network devices and ISP to respect that. Also uTP protocol itself has some dynamic bandwidth allocation. What else do you want?

The argument is that for a mainstream torrent client it should be broadly tuned for the average user machine and internet speeds. I have not explored / am aware of the options u mentioned. So the solution would be to tune for average machines but have options for scalability for heavy users with options.

Detecting the actual connection properties reliably isn't really possible unfortunately. Also problems are often not in speeds, but in high connection count. Cheap routers could choke already at hundred connections. Some ISPs limit number of connections too.

Ur missing the context, other clients are managing the bandwidth better than qbittorent on the same internet connections, so this is a tangent but not relevant. Not the right path

If you suggest to tweak the defaults, to what values exactly? People have very different network setups and speeds. It is literally impossible to come up with defaults fitting for everyone. That's why they exist as tunable settings in the first place.

I would like to know to what values as well. I do not know

[HanabishiRecca]

The argument is that for a mainstream torrent client it should be broadly tuned for the average user machine and internet speeds.

It is already. That's why I'm asking what exactly do you want to be changed.

other clients are managing the bandwidth better than qbittorent on the same internet connections

Yeah, about that. Such claims without detailed technical information are not provable nor useful. You didn't even specify the kind of network connection.

I personally don't see any issues using qBittorrent on a regular Ethernet/IPoE connection. But my personal experience doesn't proof anything either.

[UsmanTariq2]

I will see if i can input anything more concrete

[Pentaphon]

As you can see thats a lot of resources, especially disk, for just a idle computer with seeding only.

Have you checked your disk for errors? I seed hundreds of torrents on 4.6.5 1.2 libtorrent with almost no disk usage on SSD but if you are using an older hard disk with errors, that might be the root cause of your issue. https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/

[UsmanTariq2]

HDD is an nvme, no problems. Its none of these blunt causes i suspect

[rumplin]

Higher CPU utilization could also come from the network card.

Modest 35-70 seeding torrents.

This could mean that you have around 35 torrents of 1TB each or 70 torrents of 100MB each.

Even the Task Manager is struggling here, 4% CPU utilization just for running the Task Manager? Check for System interrupts on your machine, could be that you need to update some drivers.

Intel® Core™ i7-8700K Processor is a 6 core (12 threads) beast, so we can assume 10% would mean one core is at 100% ?

[UsmanTariq2]

What i mean to say is that, its only qbittorent that is heating it up, all other clients are fine. In fact i ran a 2 day job on trixati with 0 issues or crashes( i assume the same will go for other clients). So it is a qbittorent issue. That;s the jist .

The disk util could be the answer, trixati has not gone above the average disk usage that corresponds to the uploading bandwidth, while qbittorent went 5-8x as i have mentioned previously

[Pentaphon]

What i mean to say is that, its only qbittorent that is heating it up, all other clients are fine.

What settings did you change? Try reverting to default settings. I have a laptop that is a bit older than yours and it never heats up with qBittorrent or any client.

[UsmanTariq2]

I have the default settings basically. Only changes are file download paths and incoming ports and stuff like that. Things that will impact the matter I did try absolutely clean config but with my torrents intact and same output. The only thing left to do is to then backup my torrent list and then clean slate everything qbittorent related

Also, Is there any tool to backup or quickly restore my torrents?

[CyrusNajmabadi]

I have around 7300 torrents seeding:

And this is what i observe:

It sounds very much like there is an issue with your computer.

[CyrusNajmabadi]

@rumplin is correct. This is what taskmanager should be:

[stalkerok]

@CyrusNajmabadi You have 7300 active torrents, lol Don't use forced start if you don't know what it's for

[CyrusNajmabadi]

@stalkerok What's the alternative?

[stalkerok]

@CyrusNajmabadi An alternative to what? Force resume allows you to disregard torrent queue restrictions if you enable them, otherwise it's meaningless. Disable torrent queue restrictions if you do enable them and resume torrents without forcing.

[CyrusNajmabadi]

Disable torrent queue restrictions if you do enable them and resume torrents without forcing.

I want torrent queue restrictions. For example, i don't want more than a few downloading at a time, so they finish in a reasonable amount of time. If i then set max active uploads and max active total both to 'infinity' then my trackers then say i'm not seeding.

So this allow me to have limits on download, while also seeding everything.

[stalkerok]

It sounds like you're just setting your queue restrictions incorrectly...

[CyrusNajmabadi]

Here are my settings:

What should they be instead?

[stalkerok]

That's right, now try resuming torrents without forcing.

[CyrusNajmabadi]

I've tried that. My trackers now show barely seeding anything. Switching back to 'force resume' addresses that.

[stalkerok]

If the torrents are not in the queue, then they are resumed and the trackers in the torrents should be working.

[CyrusNajmabadi]

@stalkerok /shrug. I don't know what to tell you. Those are my options. And if i don't force-resume, then my trackers don't list me as seeding more than a small handful of torrents. If i force resume, i show full seeding on everything.

If that's a tracker issue, so be it. This addresses it.

If it's a qbittorrent issue (like some strange other option breaking things, or some old bug that's affecting me), so be it. This addresses it.

Unless there's some way to get my client to be properly recognized as seeding everything by my trackers without 'force resume', then i'm going to keep it that way.

[stalkerok]

@CyrusNajmabadi Do you have an older version of qbittorrent? Although I don't remember there being any issues with the torrent queue. Maybe you don't have an official qBittorrent client? PortableApps, Enhanced, etc. Anyway, in the current version it works without issue for me.

[CyrusNajmabadi]

Do you have an older version of qbittorrent?

I'm on:

Maybe you don't have an official qBittorrent client? PortableApps, Enhanced, etc.

I Installed from: https://www.qbittorrent.org/download Specifically:

Anyway, in the current version it works without issue for me.

That doesn't help me out. I'm not going to change to this approach if it breaks seeding on all my trackers. So, absent anything actionable on my end, i will continue with 'force resume'. I'm happy to try changing this in the future when new releases of qbittorrent come out to see if that changes thing.

[CyrusNajmabadi]

And, the main point holds. qbittorrent works fine with thousands of torrents, with very reasonable resource utilization:

There is something bonkers with OP's machine.

[Pentaphon]

There is something bonkers with OP's machine.

I agree. I think the OP is blaming qBittorrent for another issue on his laptop that he is neglecting to address. He needs look at his hardware more closely to find the real issue. Nobody has ever reported qBittorrent causing excessive CPU usage that overheats their laptop and the only way it can slow your internet down is if you use too many connections and it overwhelms your router.

[UsmanTariq2]

And, the main point holds. qbittorrent works fine with thousands of torrents, with very reasonable resource utilization:

There is something bonkers with OP's machine.

Look at my disk usage vs yours. Yours is corresponding to the transfer rate, mine is at 35-45mb/s for 30Mbps

[Pentaphon]

@UsmanTariq2 Let's discuss your connection slowdown issue. What kind of router do you have? How many connections are you using on qBittorrent?

[CyrusNajmabadi]

Look at my disk usage vs yours. Yours is corresponding to the transfer rate, mine is at 35-45mb/s for 30Mbps

I easily hit that, without issue.

Trivial. Very reasonable resource allocation.

[Seeker2]

Bad networking drivers has already been mentioned for high CPU usage.

A software firewall (esp. a poorly-written one embedded in anti-virus software) can cause really high CPU usage when dealing with lots of small packets from incoming connections, BitTorrent's DHT, and tracker updates. Microsoft Window's software firewall usually doesn't cause high CPU usage, but many/most 3rd party ones do if doing deep packet inspection (DPI).

[Pentaphon]

Bad networking drivers has already been mentioned for high CPU usage.

I have no doubt that the OP has

• never updated any of his drivers
• a desktop full of icons
• tons of apps running in the background
• some kind of 3rd party antivirus running all the time
• never updates his NVME firmware
• has a router that can't handle the number of connections he set up on qBittorrent

Literally all the things people do wrong with their Windows PCs and others we haven't thought of and he's blaming a torrent client for it.

[UsmanTariq2]

Bad networking drivers has already been mentioned for high CPU usage.

I have no doubt that the OP has

• never updated any of his drivers
• a desktop full of icons
• tons of apps running in the background
• some kind of 3rd party antivirus running all the time
• never updates his NVME firmware
• has a router that can't handle the number of connections he set up on qBittorrent

Literally all the things people do wrong with their Windows PCs and others we haven't thought of and he's blaming a torrent client for it.

I will consider that as a vent post . I have copied over all my torrent lists to other clients and they work nominally, so something related to qbittorent + my setup has to do with it. Your point is mute

[CyrusNajmabadi]

And others have no issue at all, with more disk utilization, more network, and more torrents.

Plus, it's clearly not a torrent client issue as you have problems with task manager as well. If you can't run task manager probably, you need to fix that first before worrying about your client.

[HanabishiRecca]

This discussion is not useful.

@UsmanTariq2, I suggest you to try qBittorrent-nox (the headless client). With that at least we will be able to bisect the CPU overhead of being the GUI issue.

[UsmanTariq2]

This discussion is not useful.

@UsmanTariq2, I suggest you to try qBittorrent-nox (the headless client). With that at least we will be able to bisect the CPU overhead of being the GUI issue.

will add that when i do the tests.

[Seeker2]

I have copied over all my torrent lists to other clients and they work nominally, so something related to qbittorent + my setup has to do with it.

Does Task Manager have >0.5% CPU usage while other torrent clients are running?

I've seen Task Manager have brief CPU spikes, especially on starting it while it polls all running apps for additional details, but usually it stays under 0.2% for me. ...But I don't use an encrypted HDD (BitLocker) or typically have low ram situations which might cause Task Manager more CPU usage. If Task Manager is set to update very quickly or with lots of detailed columns for each running app, that might increase its CPU usage as well.

So if only qBitTorrent causes high CPU usage for Task Manager (as well as itselt), yeah...you're probably right it's something related to qBT + your setup.