rTorrent + FreeBSD + pf = freeze?

[Kalle Møller]

Afaik the "problem" with fillling the router with torrent traffic as opposed
to a single host, is that the the many connections to the many host fill up
the (yes and this i don't know so I'll just say router). So Its not the
torrent traffic itself.. its that you have a lot of packets going a million
places. And as the others say, I've also seen a lot of small routers go down
on it, with the only solution is to set a max in number of connections.

On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 8:16 PM, cpghost <cpghost at cordula.ws> wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 03:20:20PM -0800, Henrik Hudson wrote:
> > On Wed, 21 Oct 2009, cpghost wrote:
> > > I'm experiencing frequent crashes on my soekris net4801 home router
> > > for some months now, and I'm wondering if it could be some kind of
> > > pf-related bug similar to this on OpenBSD:
> > >
> > >   http://www.mail-archive.com/misc@openbsd.org/msg58042.html
> > >
> > > More precisely, when I fire up rtorrent-devel on some *other* machine
> > > (not the router!), everything runs fine at first.  It could also run
> > > very fine for many days. BUT should I start a torrent with a large
> > > number of seeders which could saturate my link for an extended period
> > > of time, the soekris router would suddenly freeze... but not
> > > immediately: more like a few hours (3 to 6) or so of relatively heavy
> > > traffic. Only a hard reboot of the router would help.  Please note
> > > that rtorrent is NOT running on the router, only its traffic is being
> > > redirected through the router.
> > >
> > > So I'm suspecting some bug / resource leak in pf that would bring the
> > > kernel down somehow. What kind of resources should I monitor (and
> > > how)? Maybe that could bring some clues?
> > >
> > > Oh, before anybody asks: I have no crashdumps, the router freezes
> > > totally without panicking. And it doesn't recover automatically
> > > even after many hours.
> >
> > Possibly a heat issue? I've seen many a little dlink style or
> > similar router work fine until it has to churn through a lot of
> > packets and then it just can't handle it, starts getting warm
> > doing all the computation and then eventually freezes. I'm not
> > ruling out a memory leak or similar, but I'm currently doing the
> > same with a little atom ITX board and it handles all the torrents
> > for myself and the roomies without issue. I'm using rtorrent myself with
> > pf and 8.0-RC1-stable.  I believe the pf code is backported to 7.
> >
> > Also, if it was just a memory leak it will still happen with
> > non-torrent traffic, just most likely slower. Have you tried
> > throttling back the amount of connections and speed that rtorrent
> > makes?
>
> I've suspected a heat issue too, but sysutils/env4801 logging every
> 1 minute didn't show anything suspicious prior to the crashes.
>
> The system crashes ONLY on bittorrent traffic. Saturating the link (in
> one or both directions) even for many days in a row with 5 to 10
> concurrent TCP streams to fixed destinations didn't cause any crashes.
>
> Yes, I've played with bandwidth and nr. of connections in rtorrent,
> and, if at all, I have a feeling (but I can't proove it) that the
> number of concurrent connections doesn't harm, but that the higher
> the output bandwidth, the more likely the crash.
>
> The only thing I didn't test yet was to replace the original DC
> transformer with another one that is a tad better dimensioned.  Those
> transformers that are sent with the net4801(s) tend to degrade over
> the years for some reason (drying capacitors?). If it's not a software
> issue, this could be the cause of the crashes.
>
> > henrik
>
> Thanks for the hints,
> -cpghost.
>
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-- 

Med Venlig Hilsen

Kalle R. Møller