What exactly do the I/O tokens correspond to? Is it based strictly on transfer rate, or are all disk requests (e.g. lseek and so on) affected by it?

I've noticed that when I try to seed a BitTorrent session from my Linode 128, that it will initially drain tokens slowly enough that the count stays near 400000, even when I have my maximum upload speed set to 500KB/sec. However, as more people join, the BT client starts sucking up I/O tokens like they're going out of style. I'm guessing that it has to do with file seeks to serve up lots of different file chunks that aren't already buffered to different peers, since I've watched vmstat and not seen any significant swap activity. Eventually, I have to drop the seed down to ridiculously slow (dialup-level) speeds or hit the pause button to replenish tokens.

Any ideas on how I could stop this problem from happening?

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Bus error (passengers dumped)

I believe all IO requests, though could be mistaken. Bittorrent is the biggest problem I've had with the IO Limitter. Out of curiousity, what BT client are you using that has a pause button, and is it a console ap or graphical?

Currently I'm running an old SHAD0W client (newer versions are known as BitTornado). I'm using the GUI version, on a VNC-over-SSH connection.

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Bus error (passengers dumped)

Ahh, I am using BitTornado but the console version, I'd be very interested in a console BT client that supported pause and maybe even the ability to adjust rate limit once the client is already running. Just not interested enough to seek such a client out, you had my hopes up

http://btqueue.sourceforge.net/

Not very well documented, and a little buggy, but feature-rich.