Using CVS from 01-06-06.

If a file is added to ktorrent, it asks which files to download. Often I have torrents that contain many files and I only want to download a few, so I begin by unchecking the topmost parent directory. What happens next is the network operations window (from kio_uiserver, which I have set to show all operations in a single window) pops up and shows many file operations being executed, like copy and delete, each going very quickly, but this window stays open, doing whatever it's doing in the meantime. Sometimes I have waited up to ~1.5 minutes for all the operations to finish and ktorrent to be responsive again, depending on how many files are in the torrent.

Perhaps there is a better way to do this step internally?

On a side note, it has rarely happened that this operation stalls, leaving the kio_uiserver window open with a single blank line that can't be canceled, and leaving me to have to kill both kio_uiserver and ktorrent. This may just be kio_uiserver, though, and rare, odd behavior related to its handling of many successive disk operations.

Weird... Just, how many files were in those torrents? I had some with about 150 files and I didn't have any problems...

This is how KT handles selecting deselecting of files :

Each torrent has a torX (X being a number), there are two subdirectories :

torX/cache
torX/dnd (dnd == do not download)

The cache subdirectory contains symlinks for each file of the torrent, these symlinks point to either the file in the save directory or the file in the dnd directory (indicating that the file is not to be downloaded)

So when you deselect a file, it gets moved from the save directory to the dnd directory, the symlink gets modified and will now point to the file in the dnd directory.

Moving files around on the same partition, should be a very fast operation (after all you do not need to change the actual location on disk). If your torX directory and the save directory are on a different partition, this can be expensive. (In which case you should deselect all unwanted files when you load the torrent)

This method has the advantage, that when you reselect a file again all the data allready downloaded for that file is not lost. Another advantage is that handling of border chunks is very easy because of the symlinks.