I now run rtorrent as my torrent client of choice on my tonido plug. I can’t recommend it highly enough, especially in conjunction with rutorrent webUI.
One of the problems I had was that rtorrent is so efficient in using the bandwidth that it makes browsing very sluggish. Whenever I wanted to use the internet for something else, I used to ssh into the box and terminate the rtorrent process or at least throttle it from the webUI. However, my father also uses the internet connection and I needed a much simpler way to control how much of the bandwidth rtorrent uses.
One way could me using rutorrent and cutting it down to just barebones. However this solution seemed inelegant. rtorrent has an excellent XML-RPC implementation to control most of its actions. In fact, rutorrent uses this to control rtorrent. So, I thought why not use Rails to write a small webapp for iPhone to use XML RPC and do basic throttling and status reporting? Rails was probably too much for this application. Especially given that I didn’t need a database. Perhaps something like sinatra should’ve sufficed. However, it turned out to be exceedingly simple to write it in rails and I did so anyway.