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#1 2012-12-11 18:21:41

darkfeline
Member
Registered: 2012-02-14
Posts: 94

Help me understand aria2

I've been looking into lightweight solutions lately, since I find that they often offer more functionality and flexibility in addition to the smaller footprint and ability to run without X.  I want to use aria2 as a download manager, also replacing Transmission as my go-to torrent manager.  However, I'm having trouble understanding how aria2 works with torrents.

Normally with Transmission I can just add a torrent file and Transmission will take care of the rest, tracking download process and then seeding, as well as bandwidth throttling, proxies, etc.  But it seems like aria2 is just a more full-featured wget.  I just run aria2 something.torrent and it downloads it as necessary and seeds it.  Is there some central point of reference for which I can track all the torrents' progress?  Does aria2 keep track of where it left off when I restart my computer?  I seed a lot, so having something keep track of my torrents and keep seeding whenever I start it up is useful.  But it seems like aria2 is more suited for a one-time download of the torrent and seeding it to 1.0?

Can someone with experience with aria2 explain to me what exactly aria2 as a download manager "manages" (it doesn't seem like it keeps track of the files I'm downloading if I restart my computer for example), and if using it as a torrent manager satisfies my use case, or if I'm just giving myself more trouble if I use aria2?

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#2 2012-12-11 18:44:30

theGunslinger
Member
Registered: 2011-05-20
Posts: 300

Re: Help me understand aria2

Just use rtorrent, it has most of the functions you had with transmission so the transition will be easy, runs without X and is lightweight.

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#3 2012-12-11 18:45:47

lucke
Member
From: Poland
Registered: 2004-11-30
Posts: 4,018

Re: Help me understand aria2

I believe aria2 works indeed like wget (its homepage calls it a download utility). I'd suggest using transmission-daemon (you can access it via cli/web/qt clients; right now it uses 26MB on my server, with cache set to 10MB and with multiple torrents running, aria2's homepage says it typically uses 9MB for a bittorrent download).

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#4 2012-12-11 19:22:33

darkfeline
Member
Registered: 2012-02-14
Posts: 94

Re: Help me understand aria2

Thanks!  rtorrent looks like it suits my needs exactly.

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