Flood: Separate download folders for users

[sachaw]

The ability have each users torrents separate is needed.

[jfurrow]

Yeah, this is a good idea. I'm still not sure how best to handle multiple users...

[sachaw]

I think it could be as simple as adding an user id to each torrent, then setting the basedir to /downloads/username or something like that, so when the user logs in it will display torrents that have there userid

[varyoo]

What's wrong with a Flood instance per user?

[dcousens]

@varyoo that would be a rtorrent and flood instance per user?

[varyoo]

Yes of course! How would it be bad?

[sachaw]

Very heavy on resources, terrible idea.

[varyoo]

Very heavy on resources, terrible idea.

Please be more specific sir.

[wopian]

Requiring a separate instance of rtorrent & flood for each user does not scale at all and wastes excessive amounts of memory (rtorrent uses 40mb and flood 60mb when idle).

Thus the lowest tier from DigitalOcean would only be able to physically allow 5 users (with 0 memory left to do anything). The tier can easily support 20-30 users with a single instance and wouldn't ever have to worry about memory usage

[varyoo]

@wopian how many torrents for those values?

[wopian]

0

[sachaw]

Yea, separate instances are not the the way to go about this, like I said earlier, assigning the id of the user who added the torrent to the torrent in a db then calling all torrents with the logged in users id and display them, then we can have a single instance of rtorrent and flood.

[jfurrow]

A long time ago I think I suggested that multi-users be handled by multiple instances of rtorrent. I agree with @wopian that this is a bad idea.

I think true multiuser support would be cool, but would be a huge amount of work, and it's not a big priority for me. If someone else wants to take it on, then let's come to an agreement about how it should be implemented first, and then you can run with it.

[jvacek]

[Edited as I actually read up above]

(summary of #518) What about multiple rtorrent instances and one flood server that can have multiple users that can each just connect to the right socket as an option?
It would allow more people to switch from their current setups and might just be easier to do. Having an option to switch between single-rtorrent and multi-rtorrent would be nicer, and would prevent some of the issues I think could arise when running one rtorrent instance for more users below.

• I would suspect most multi-user setups already have multiple rtorrent clients, as that's what a lot of scripts have set up and generally that seems to be the consensus on how to provide multiple instances of torrent clients to multiple people (deluge, transmission, etc). These tools don't seem to have been made for the purpose
• If a user breaks their rtorrent instance, they will bring down everyone else with them
• There will have to be a new watch-folder for each user, and flood would have to link them up the right way with the users.
• Other rtorrent clients and rtorrent-dependent programs (such as Transdroid, Barmagnet, autodl-irssi) won't be able to cooperate with the single-rtorrent setup as they cannot differentiate between users.
• Some users' DLs/ULs might choke out others, as there will probably be one set of limits for speeds which will apply to all torrents under that instance.
• Not sure what is rtorrent's highest possible amount of torrents it can do at once, but using one instance will basically force multiple users to share one cap of max torrents. I've heard mentioned that rtorrent can pretty much handle as much as 20k torrents, which would mean that if 1/20 users has 15k torrents loaded, 19 users will have to fit within 5k torrents together. Max open files, open sockets, etc.
• Not sure how will rtorrent handle the same torrent being saved in two different folders, haven't had good experience with that before using rutorrent.

I don't have good enough rtorrent knowledge to say this is exactly how it works, but it might be a start for some of the development.
I would personally definitely be in favour of being able to use multiple rotrrent instances, as it will just be easier for everyone, and I cannot see that much added benefit from using one single instance when it comes to resources. It might be more hustle than it's worth to develop around one single rtorrent instance.

[jvacek]

The #549 PR is good, has anyone else tested it out yet? nudge nudge :)