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Strange iowait and ntfs or ext4 for torrents?

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huxuan

Occasional Visitor
Just struggling with transmission on AC86U with the latest stable version (384.14_2) of Merlin for days.

I thought ext4 should be the answer especially for the preallocation feature. Since NTFS freeze at the beginning of downloading and iostat shows that it keeps writing at about 100 MB/s (USB 3.0) for preallocation, so obviously the freezing time will linearly scale as the increasing size of torrents. Moreover, I tried to set the preallocation settings to 0 (no preallocation), but seems it does not take any effects.

After I backup all the data and format the disk into ext4. Everything looks good at the beginning but I suddenly find that the iowait is exploding when I try to download large torrents. Previously it can reach about 20MB/s downloading speed on NTFS with about 10-20% iowait. But even after I limit the download speed to less than 3 MB/s, the iowait still explode and will freeze the whole system in seconds which even affects normal internet access on other clients. I know the router's CPU is slow but at least it should work the same as NTFS, right?

To summarize, I have three questions.
1) Can I avoid the freeze preallocation on NTFS?
2) How comes the exploding iowait on ext4? I must have missed some really important aspects.
3) Any other suggestions on filesystem for torrents?
 
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