In some cases, rTorrent may become inaccessible to the point where the system fails to automatically restart the client. These steps should help you rectify the situation.

1) If rTorrent is running OK, you can attach it with SSH:

screen -r PID

Pressing Ctrl + q exits (terminates) rTorrent and closes the screen session. When rTorrent starts again it will not re-hash all your torrents (but it will if you use kill, see below).

Remember that there is a cron job running on the server that checks every 10 minutes if your rTorrent is running, and if it's not, restarts it for you. Be sure to allow this to fix the client before other methods are employed (like the previous example).

2) Restarting rTorrent if it has frozen

If rTorrent is frozen, you will need to kill it in order to restart it afterward.

Type:

ps x

(this will list all processes under your username).

Type:

kill -9 PID

(where PID is the process ID listed in the left column for rTorrent).

Once killed run:

ps x

again to make sure it is dead. Repeat the kill command a few times if it doesn't work the first time.

Now you can start it back up by typing:

screen rtorrent

It may take a few seconds to start up if you have a lot of torrents added.

3) If rTorrent cannot be killed

Sometimes processes are not able to be killed, even with

kill -9

In this event please open a support ticket informing us that you have already tried the 'kill' command.

4) rTorrent will not start in shell

You try to start the rTorrent process with the command:

screen rtorrent

but it just returns an error:

Screen is terminating

You can then start Screen with a command:

screen

This will put you inside a Screen session. And once inside the Screen session, type:

rtorrent

It will give you some kind of error telling you why it cannot start.

If the error is:

rtorrent: Could not lock session directory: "/home/USERNAME/private/rtorrent/work/", held by "".

or the errors states:

"rtorrent: Invalid DHT cache"

then here is what needs to be done:

1) Close the Screen session you just opened, by typing:

exit

2) Now you need to delete the rtorrent.lock file which is located in the ~/private/rtorrent/work/ folder with this command:

rm ~/private/rtorrent/work/rtorrent.lock

Or delete the file rtorrent.dht_cache, which is in the same directory, with this command:

rm ~/private/rtorrent/work/rtorrent.dht_cache

3) You can now start rTorrent with the normal command:

screen rtorrent

It should now launch without an error. Log into your wTorrent or ruTorrent session to verify.

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