Transmission

Don't forget that this is a free app, by voluntary developers. Apparently they have a hard time figuring out what's going wrong here.

Somemone added an interesting detail to the bug report:

VMware's added network interfaces or its NAT daemon might be part of the cause (http://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/1201)

What about others having this problem: Have you installed vmware as well?

I do (and I'm seeing the problem)!

In any ...

Does CrashReporter generate a freeze report for this period?
Of course not. CrashReporter only records app crashes, but a system freeze is something totally different.

As I've explained, it's only the network stack that's dead, causing all apps that use sockets or whatever for comms are stalling ...

Is a Transmission developer follwing this? Hello?

I am still going down the network route (but will keep watching the memory consumption now as well).

One more thing I've noticed is that when last night only the outward network data of Transmission stalled (i.e. it kept downloading but didn't upload any more), the system still worked. I then ...

Oh darn, it froze again on me. Much later than before, but it still happens.
So, the DNS "fix" is not a remedy.

albryw, here's another thing to check: in Terminal, enter "netstat -nr" and see if there are full IP addresses listed that don't exist - that's how I found that a address was constantly used that didn't respond, and that's how I found the wrong DNS entry.

I have found a little misconfiguration on my Mac that might have contributed to the problem:

In the Network Preferences, I had entered a non-existing DNS server's IP address. I've removed it and now the problem doesn't appear to surface any more (unless it's just taking a longer while).

But so far ...

OK, I was hit by this problem for the first time today. I've done quite some "debugging" before coming here and finding this is not just me having this happen.

Here's a few notes and observations:
- I'm running 10.5.5 with Transmission 1.34 on an 8-core MacPro. I've never seen this problem ever ...