rTorrent 0.8.4

I have been using rtorrent for the past few years almost exclusively for all my downloads. It is the lightest client, very reliable and loaded with features. My configuration file allowed rtorrent to watch for new torrents in a specific folder, seed it until a 2:1 ratio is achieved and then stop the torrent. Also, it self-managed bandwidth in a way that internet speeds were good during the day, and maximum downloads/uploads were achieved at night. For my setup, I had it installed initially on my debian box and now on my basement old iMac through macports. My main machine is the latest iBook that Apple released, and all the computers are connected to each other with afp, using this amazing guide. I also use mostly ssh and occasionally vnc (JollysFastVNC) to control and configure everything.

Last night, I was updating my basement iMac and rtorrent was updated to version 0.8.2. This resulted to failure of rtorrent to start due to some incompatibility with the version of libtorrent that was provided with the update. In order to make rtorrent usable again, I had to uninstall rtorrent and install rtorrent-devel, which provided me with the latest unstable version 0.8.4. However, it seems that the ratio handling for this version has changed. Now, my rtorrent.rc configuration file that I have been using for 2 boxes for almost 2 years (with some editing) is not really usable. This means that rtorrent works full on all the time, making internet crawl for the rest of my applications!

I really like rtorrent but until somebody looks into the new configuration rules more, I switched to Transmission for MacOSX. I still have rtorrent on my debian box which I don't really use for downloads any more, and I hope I can switch back to rtorrent on the iMac, since checking the torrent progress through screen over ssh on my iPhone was uber cool.


UPDATE 12.14.08
I tried Transmission and it worked ok; it would watch a folder and download anything I threw in. However, it would not follow my settings for download folder, and clutter the tiny drive of the old iMac. Also, the download speeds were very slow, approx 20-40 KB/s. So, I switched back to rTorrent once and for all. Hopefully I will figure out the whole config problem...