Sorry if this belongs more to asus forum than here, but I would appreciate some insight if someone is running similar setup.

I am trying to turn it into my home "network hub" using additional optware software. That means that I require it to be smb server for 2x500Gb USB hard disks, torrent and to run screen with irssi. I however have some doubts and several questions about it (since I'd like to avoid running a machine thats constantly stuck on 100% cpu, its heating enough already).

Question 1 (swap):
I see people complaining about their swap not being used, has anyone cleared this issue and confirm that kamikaze7.09 can use swap?
Is having a swap file necessary (or at least highly recommended) for what I plan to run on my machine?
I'd prefer to have both of my disks hotswappable, but I guess if I have swap running on one of them it wont be that easy (of course I would properly unmount one having optware on it and kill running opt programs if I need to remove it

Question 2 (smb):
I have noticed that large samba tranfers and intensive I/O operations take heavy toll even on my desktop computer so I am wondering what sort of performance can I expect from this little gizmo (240mhz, 32MB ram)?
For example ... will streaming a movie from one of attached disks be possible, what sort of transfer rates are we talking about?

Question 3 (torrent):
I plan to run rtorrent, what are the limitations I should be aware of, number of connections etc?
I have very modest internet connection 256k and I prefer having only one torrent active in a queue, so I guess thats helping a bit.

(Last edited by PinkBunny on 7 Jun 2008, 06:48)

I have played around with using my NAS to do what you are looking for. The software it comes with includes torrent downloader (Not sure if it's rtorrent, but i think it is). Anyway, it has a 500mhz ARM cpu and 128mb of ram, after starting about 4 torrent downloads the NAS would become unresponsive. I installed rtorrent/wtorrent to see if it would work a little better, it did, but still ate through the resources i had available.  I ended up just using utorrent on my windows desktop.

I'm not sure how reliable your asus will be after you start running rtorrent for long periods of time. Your routed traffic may take a performance hit since rtorrent will be basically using all your resources.

As for streaming over samba/cifs, it works fine. I have streamed videos off of the wl500gp without problems. You may look into some upnp media software if you have an xbox or ps3, or some other kind of media center extender. I use this with my nas.

For swap, you need it if you are going to be using rtorrent.

Swap works ok (for me), just give it a higher priority (default is -1).

If you ask, the longer it takes.

Or in other words: It’s done, when it’s done