Schedule When Your Seedbox Downloads and Seeds

Two things push people towards scheduling a seedbox: a home connection that cannot cope with a full-speed pull during the day, and trackers or housemates who would rather you did your heavy lifting overnight. rTorrent has no built-in scheduler, but Liteflow can start and stop everything on a clock, and it takes about two minutes to set up.

The idea

You build a pair of flows. One stops every running torrent at the start of your quiet hours; the other starts them again when the window opens. Stopping a torrent is not the same as deleting it — the torrent, its data and its resume state all stay exactly where they are, and it picks up where it left off.

Build the “stop” flow

1. Open your service in the client area and click Open Liteflow on the Automation card.
2. Create New → Start from Template, choose Pause everything on a schedule (bandwidth window), then Use Template and Confirm.
3. Click the trigger, Every day at 08:00. Set the hour you want everything to stop and — this matters — set the timezone to your own. The default is UTC.
4. Click List started and pick your rTorrent connection.
5. Click Stop and pick the same connection.
6. Publish.

Build the “start” flow

Import the same template a second time. Rename it, set the trigger to the hour your window opens, and change the last step’s Operation from Stop to Start. One detail: the first step reads the started view, which will be empty once everything is stopped. Change its View to Stopped so the start flow sees the torrents it is meant to wake up.

Narrowing it down

Stopping everything is blunt. Two ways to be gentler:

• By label. Put a label in the List step and only that group is paused. Pause public overnight and leave your private-tracker seeds running all day, so your ratio keeps building while your bandwidth window is closed.
• Leeching only. Set the view to Leeching in the stop flow. Downloads pause; seeding carries on. This is usually what people actually want, since seeding is what trackers measure and downloading is what saturates a link.

Weekends, and other patterns

The daily trigger has a run on weekends switch — turn it off and the schedule only applies Monday to Friday. If you need something more specific than “once a day at an hour”, swap the trigger for Cron Expression: 0 2 * * 1-5 is 02:00 on weekdays, 0 */6 * * * is every six hours.

Things worth knowing

• Stopping affects your ratio. A stopped torrent uploads nothing. If your tracker counts seed time, pausing for eight hours a day counts against you — prefer the leeching-only variant.
• Hit-and-run rules do not pause. A tracker’s minimum seed time keeps running whether your client is up or not on most trackers, but not all. Check before you schedule long pauses on a freeleech grab.
• Scheduling is not throttling. If what you actually want is “slower during the day, full speed at night”, set the global rate limits in ruTorrent instead — Settings → Bandwidth. That keeps everything connected and seeding.
• Two flows, not one. Keep the start and stop flows separate. It is easier to disable one half for a week than to unpick a single flow with branches in it.