Torrent

CrossSeed

One of the newer services I added to the suite, it searches for torrents I currently am seeding and attempts to use other trackers in prowlarr to attempt to seed the content in other places. It's a really amazing tool in helping to build ratio in other private trackers without needing to download content I already have. With the most recent version it automatically sends torrents to qbittorrent with the correct category to avoid sonarr or radarr from picking up the download as an upgrade. This was an issue for some time as they would constantly import new files that came from cross seeds and caused notification spams to occur.

Decluttarr

warning

Deprecated

Another service like cross-seed that was added recently, it helped to add some additional clean up tasks to qbittorrent that qbitmanage did not do. It can detect slow, stalled, or stuck torrents and remove them and in addition trigger a new search in sonarr or radarr. It also has some features in being able to trigger searches in radarr and sonarr to search for media that is not currently meeting the cutoff or missing. In recent testing I realized it specifically looks at radarr and tv-sonarr categories and not others.

qBitmanage

A great service to use in conjunction with qbittorrent this ensures that only media that exists in my media library continue to be seeded in qbittorrent. It does this by checking hardlinks of what exists in the Download folder, and if it finds none, it marks it as ready to be deleted. With that cleanup service it also performs checks against torrents to ensure they are actually working and registered with the tracker. It also enhances qbittorrent by enabling Auto Torrent Management so that certain torrent categories are stored in specific folders that can be defined in qbitmanage's config file. It also allows for really cool tracker tagging so that I am aware of what torrents are coming from which trackers. In addition you can add protection to torrents from private trackers to ensure they are not immediately deleted and removed until they have reached a certain seed ratio. This avoids getting hnr warnings from trackers. Getting the configuration down on defining cleanup rules for noHardLinks and issues took some time, but I've really simplified it since the initial setup so it's barely any different from the default.

qBittorrent

Similar to jellyfin this is my most used service in my configuration. This is the backbone of all torrent dowloading in my cluster and does so by using a vpn. Currently I am using the hotio image that comes with an auto configuration of connecting to a vpn and updating the port in qbittorrent to allow for port forwarding. With this I'm able to detect more peers and have increased download and upload speeds. In addition the image comes with an alternative VueTorrent ui that is amazing compared to the original ui that qbittorrent comes with. Prior to running the hotio image I used a combination of this and gluetun to run it in a vpn but it required needing to write a custom script to update the qbittorrent port to allow for port forwarding. Prior to that I used transmission but I found over time that qbittorrent's category and tag management was far superior to transmission and allowed for better organization. An even more important discovery is it's ability to limit the amount of peers that can be connected to the client.

It turns out that connection limits were only an issue because I was perma seeding torrents on public trackers. I decided, in order to boost my ratio better in private trackers, to cap seeding limits for public torrents to 5. Once that threshold hit the torrent would be completed and removed and with that all of my issues regarding cpu usage and high io were completely gone. While it was good for me to do that before I have way too many private trackers to be limiting my bandwidth just because of issues with public trackers.

note

Updated Configuration (12/1/25)

• Global Number of Max Connections: -1
• Global Number of Max Upload Slots: -1
• Maximum Number of Connections per torrent: -1
• Maximum Number of Upload slots per torrent: 10

qui

This was a new UI for qbittorrent, that did way more that was I was expecting. The UI itself is amazing and way better than vuetorrent and allows you to connect multiple torrent instances to it. One thing that was super interesting was it does have built in cross-seed functionality, but I preferred not to use it because the setup I have now is really good. Another great thing is it provided a proxy for qbittorrent so applications weren't spamming it with creating new sessions when trying to interface with it and instead used a shared session. There's also some really minor stuff that makes it pretty great, like showing ratio per tracker etc.

Unpackerr

I didn't think I would ever need this service until I added digitalcore to my list of private trackers. For some odd reason the content that comes from this tracker is all in archive or zip files and sonarr or radarr do not have the support for importing files like that. In order to solve that problem unpackerr was created to added a step after a download is completed and an archive file is detected, unpackerr will take care of extracting the file and then importing it directly into one of the services. It would cause the torrent file to be marked as noHL because the zip file is not hardlinked anywhere else, but with qbitmanage it will continue to keep the torrent until it hits a seed ratio of 1. This was really easy to configure and has been automatically handling these downloads since I first set it up.