Disk Usage Issue

[GKid94]

qBittorrent uses a lot of disk

[xavier2k6]

@GKid94 Try 4.1.8 & report back.

[GKid94]

@xavier2k6

[xavier2k6]

@GKid94 Can you provide some additional info in relation to your hardware specs/OS etc.

[GKid94]

@xavier2k6 DxDiag.txt

[xavier2k6]

seems you have a 1tb split into 2 partitions, correct? Have you defragged them? you have very little free space left on your C: drive.....16GB.....performance hitter - right there. qbittorrent only seems to be using 13.9MB/s - can you click on the disk usage tab to show what process/program is using the most disk usage.... Have you checked the health of the drive with a program like crystaldiskinfo etc?

[GKid94]

@xavier2k6 Yes I have two partitions and I've set the Windows Defrag to defrag the drive every day

[xavier2k6]

I don't think qbittorrent is issue, can you show what my first suggestion looks like now or even better task manager/right click->show resource values->disk->percents.

[GKid94]

@xavier2k6

[FranciscoPombal]

@GKid94 Looking at your Dxdiag.txt files shows that you are using a relatively slow HDD.

Remember that torrenting is very much a random and mixed acess workload, so even at a relatively modest throughput it will be enough to overwhelm HDDs, especially slower ones. Torrent clients generally use all leftover I/O resources that they can.

Plus, all other system apps also do a fair bit of random I/O, which further increases contention of I/O resources.

Solutions:

• Force sequential downloading, will help up to a point.
• Use an SSD instead. Random/mixed access performance of an SSD is much better than that of an HDD. You will be able to come close to or even reach the SSD's theoretical max. sequential throughput, even with a lot of torrents (provided you have the network speed for that).

Finally, just to make sure this is not a problem with qBIttorrent in particular, you could try loading similar torrents in another torrent client and see if disk performance is about the same.

Do note that properly benchmarking/profiling torrent client performance in any scientifically meaningful way is notoriously difficult due to swarm volatility. The composition and behaviour of the swarm from even one hour to the next can drastically affect your client's behaviour and measured performance, especially when using an HDD.

For example, assume that you have two similarly good torrent clients, a fast enough network connection ("infinitely" fast), and loosely define "performance" as actual throughput/max theoretical sequential throughput.

Suppose that you try downloading torrent A in client 1; during the download, the swarm has some seeders and a lot of peers. In that case, your performance should be relatively bad, since your disk will be trying to do a lot of random reads and writes at the same time (since you have to upload to the many peers but also download from the seeders and peers).

Suppose that a few hours later, after the download finishes, you try downloading torrent A again in client 2. This time, most of the peers might have finished the download, and so there are a lot of peers. Thus, your disk will be mostly writing during the duration of the download (as opposed to alternating quickly between reading and writing) and your client may even automatically start sequentially downloading pieces (this is something libtorrent does automatically when the speed/availability is big enough).

In the second case, your performance will be much greater. However, your boost in performance when using client 2 was not due to the client itself, but due to the nature of the swarm and the way it did not cause your disk to do things it's bad at doing.

TL;DR:

• slow HDDs are slow
• forcing sequential downloading helps up to a point
• using an SSD instead is the definite solution
• About performance-related issues: Due to the nature of torrenting, a speculated performance issue should come with actual profiling data + adequate analysis supporting the claim. Until proven otherwise, the issue lies in the users machine/environment/configuration and not in qBittorrent/libtorrent/Delug/Transmission/etc.

[GKid94]

@xavier2k6 I don't have that issue with other programs or uTorrent

[FranciscoPombal]

@xavier2k6 I don't have that issue with other programs or uTorrent

Provide numbers/analysis to substantiate your claim, please. In similar torrents, does utorrent achieve faster speeds/uses less resources? if so, by how much? etc.

Screenshots of task manager are not considered sufficient data to to back up a claim of performance issues in general. The only instance where I would consider a screenshot to be enough for this purpose:

1. Download a very well seeded .torrent, like the most recent Ubuntu LTS torrent http://releases.ubuntu.com/18.04/ubuntu-18.04.3-desktop-amd64.iso.torrent

2. Close all other programs, including anti-virus (if you have one) and use utorrent to download the torrent. Take a screenshot of the speedgraph for the duration of the download.

3. Close utorrent, delete the file, open qbittorrent, and repeat step 2.

4. Open a new issue here with both screenshots.

This is really only the bare minimum required to post a valid performance issue claim, and it only concerns download/upload speed.

A much better way of gathering data to substantiate your performance claims is to use the Windows Performance Monitor. You can log disk/cpu/network/others activity over a period of time and then upload the resulting log file.

Here are some resources to help get you started: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/ask-the-performance-team/windows-performance-monitor-overview/ba-p/375481 https://www.windowscentral.com/how-use-performance-monitor-windows-10

When you have proper data that can substantiate your claims, submit a new issue.

@thalieht close please.