spillspill / docs
Limits and performance
Hard limits
Torrents beyond these limits are refused when added.
| Limit | Value |
|---|---|
.torrent / metadata size | 16 MiB |
| Pieces per torrent | 1,048,576 |
| Piece size | 512 MiB |
| Files per torrent | 100,000 |
Only the first 32 web seeds of a torrent are used.
Daemon-wide limits:
| Limit | Value |
|---|---|
Running torrents (active_downloads + active_seeds) | 64 |
Connections per torrent (peers) | 4096 (default 50) |
| Peers uploaded to at once, per torrent | 8 |
| Config file size | 64 KiB |
There is no limit on how many torrents the catalog holds; torrents beyond the
active slots wait as queued.
Resource use
- Memory: each running torrent may buffer up to
cache_bytes+write_queue_bytes(32 MiB by default) at peak. Typical use is far lower. - Open files: Spill keeps every file of a running torrent open while it
runs. A torrent with 100,000 files uses about 100,000 file descriptors. The
daemon raises its soft descriptor limit to the hard limit at startup on
Linux. On macOS it uses the smaller of the hard limit and
kern.maxfilesperproc; see Troubleshooting. - Threads: one async thread runs the daemon; disk I/O and hashing run on a blocking thread pool.
Measured baselines
Measured on a Linux desktop (Intel Core Ultra 7 265, ext4) on a local network,
against Transmission 4.1. They are measurements, not guarantees; raw data is in
tests/interop/baselines/.
| Scenario | Result |
|---|---|
| 1 GiB from one Transmission seed | Spill 11.2 s, Transmission 19.5 s |
| 8 leechers × 256 MiB from one Transmission seed | Spill ~10.6 s (p50 of 10 runs), Transmission 13.7 s |
| 33 torrents, 768 MiB, 4 download slots | 35 MiB peak memory, 118 open files, 1.5 ms p95 control latency |
| Restart with 33 complete torrents | 0.1 s, nothing downloaded again |
| One torrent with 100,000 files | 184 MiB peak memory, 100,018 open files; restart 9.7 s |
Known gaps
- No protocol encryption, so peers that require it can’t be reached.
- Automatic mapping supports NAT-PMP and UPnP IGD, not PCP or IPv6 pinholes.
- The DHT is IPv4 only.
- No BitTorrent v2 or hybrid torrents.
- Files of a running torrent stay open; torrents with very many files are costly (see above).