Transmission causes leopard slow death

zoara · Post by **zoara** » Mon May 26, 2008 9:14 pm

I am getting this problem too. Thought I would add my experiences to help chase down the bug... having said that, some of this is based on my hazy memories, so it might not be the most help (I will say when it is though).

I have been getting these problems on 1.20 and 1.21; I also tried the latest nightly (r5934) and still got the issue. I'm pretty sure that I wasn't getting the problem on 1.11, and I almost definitely wasn't getting it on 1.06 or before. I don't think I used 1.10 at all. I've tried dumping my preferences but that didn't work.

I'm currently on OSX 10.5.2 - I wasn't getting the issues before 10.5.2, but I am almost definite that they didn't start when I updated, so it's probably not that.

I am getting Transmission to store all my torrents (downloading and seeding) on a USB disk hooked up to a latest-model Airport Extreme. What seems to trigger things for me is a certain amount of data being sent or received; if I Verify Local Data on a larger number of smaller files, it is fine; if I Verify Local Data on a smaller number of larger files, it is fine; if, however, I Verify too much data, it seems to trigger it. At a guess, I'd say it was in the region of around 15GB, but that's a very rough guess. I've tried giving it 'cooling off' periods, where I verify a couple of gigs, wait 15 minutes or so, then verify some more (I thought my Airport was overheating!) but that doesn't change anything. I haven't tried quitting and restarting during the 'cooling off' period though. It *does* seems to be okay if I just seed/download the data it already knows about (ie I don't verify anything) but that's a much lower amount of data.

The symptoms are then much as already described. My Airport menubar icon greys out and I get beachballs when I hover over it. Then I get the 'gradual spread' of beachballs - having read the thread I recognise that it is to do with disk access; when a process needs disk access, it hangs. If I am accessing my machine remotely, I just lose the connection (and it's immediate) - that's VNC over SSH from outside my machine's local network. I haven't tested whether other machines get network problems when my machine is in this state, though I think my girlfriend has made a few mentions of seeing the dialog that appears when network disks unexpectedly unmount.

What I *have* noticed in addition to the comments here is that when the machine is in that half-hung state, there is a very faint, very regular ticking from my disk. It's a 200GB Hitachi (HTS722020K9SA00) sitting inside a MacBook Pro. I get a tick every second or so; perhaps the head parking? It doesn't seem as loud as the head-parking tick you hear if you move the laptop just after closing the lid (while it is still writing safe sleep data to disk) so I could be mistaken.

Anyway, hope this helps. I can run some tests to verify or give more accurate figures if you need (on whatever version you want me to). I'm currently testing Transmission v1.10 and - so far, fingers crossed - I am not seeing the problem (I've written this whole post while it has been verifying data - so far 6GB or so). I will report back later to give an update!

zoara · Post by **zoara** » Wed May 28, 2008 10:59 am

Uhm, it still happens with 1.10. In fact, I also managed to get a kernel panic - possibly not related, but it does mention an issue with filesystems. For what it's worth, I have had a handful of panics over the last six months or so, all of which have had issues with afpfs and all of which have occurred when Transmission is running.

Code: Select all

Tue May 27 17:51:30 2008
panic(cpu 1 caller 0x001A8C8A): Kernel trap at 0x4b813b49, type 14=page fault, registers:
CR0: 0x8001003b, CR2: 0xffffffff, CR3: 0x00f89000, CR4: 0x00000660
EAX: 0x00000001, EBX: 0x048dd634, ECX: 0x00000000, EDX: 0x00000000
CR2: 0xffffffff, EBP: 0x341c7d58, ESI: 0x00000000, EDI: 0x00000000
EFL: 0x00010246, EIP: 0x4b813b49, CS:  0x00000008, DS:  0x00000010
Error code: 0x0000000b

Backtrace, Format - Frame : Return Address (4 potential args on stack) 
0x341c7b68 : 0x12b0f7 (0x4581f4 0x341c7b9c 0x133230 0x0) 
0x341c7bb8 : 0x1a8c8a (0x461720 0x4b813b49 0xe 0x460ed0) 
0x341c7c98 : 0x19ece5 (0x341c7cb0 0x0 0x341c7d58 0x4b813b49) 
0x341c7ca8 : 0x4b813b49 (0xe 0x48 0x10 0x10) 
0x341c7d58 : 0x4b817883 (0x48e8dc4 0xffffffff 0x0 0x4b8005cb) 
0x341c7d88 : 0x4b7eb0c2 (0x341c7eec 0x0 0x0 0x0) 
0x341c7f28 : 0x4b7f0cb7 (0x464b004 0x500d804 0x464b280 0x1) 
0x341c7fc8 : 0x19eadc (0x464b004 0x0 0x1a20b5 0x4a2eb58) 
Backtrace terminated-invalid frame pointer 0
      Kernel loadable modules in backtrace (with dependencies):
         com.apple.filesystems.afpfs(8.5.5)@0x4b7e5000->0x4b829fff

BSD process name corresponding to current thread: kernel_task

Mac OS version:
9C7010

Kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 9.2.2: Tue Mar  4 21:17:34 PST 2008; root:xnu-1228.4.31~1/RELEASE_I386
System model name: MacBookPro2,2 (Mac-F42187C8)

I've migrated my torrents over to Azureus (with much regret, what a horrible UI!) but can still test this issue with Transmission.

Is this officially raised as a bug? How can I raise it and/or take part in bug testing?

jah · Post by **jah** » Wed May 28, 2008 12:15 pm

If you have a reasonably specific issue, you can open a bug report at:
http://trac.transmissionbt.com/timeline

GreyArea · Post by **GreyArea** » Sat May 31, 2008 8:24 am

I can confirm that I've seen this as well. Transmission 1.21, 10.5.2 and 10.5.3

motulist · Post by **motulist** » Sat May 31, 2008 10:17 pm

OMG! Yes! Transmission has constantly been totally killing my Leopard! Worse, it doesn't seem like Transmission is to blame so I just thought my computer was dying or Leopard was a bad OS or something. The only way I even realized the problem was being caused by Transmission is that I though since my Mac kept crashing about once a day I thought my Mac was dying, so I started babying it, which meant no Transmission usage. After it seemed stable for a few days I figured all those crashes had cured themselves, then I started Transmission and sure enough a few hours later Leopard blew up again.

This is a terrible bug!

The symptoms are really bizarre and don't obviously appear to be caused by an error in Transmission because even once the problem starts destroying everything, transmission doesn't give any error and it still acts like it's trying to chug along like all the rest of my open apps.

What happens is all of a sudden my Mac will act like it lost its net connection, but when I go to try to the ethernet icon in the menu bar it'll say it's still connected. Then If I pull the ethernet cable out, OS X still thinks it's connected to the net! If I select 'disconnect from ethernet' then the whole OS X menubar freezes. And sometimes it results in me not being able to switch front applications, the OS acts like a different app is in the front, but the key-commands from a different program are the ones that actually respond. And when the error occurs I can't quit any programs, yet I still have some UI control. If I wait a really long time, like 5 to 10 minutes, sometimes the OS recovers and I get control back, but then it won't usually let me even restart the Mac. The only way to recover is a hard power-down.

10.5.3
Powerbook G4 1 ghz
Transmission 1.21 (5890)

This is a MAJOR bug that MUST get the absolute highest priority attention.

alexmuller · Post by **alexmuller** » Sun Jun 01, 2008 5:34 pm

Just to let you know it's affecting me as well, under both 10.5.2 and since I've updated to 10.5.3... it started for me while using 1.21, but has occurred again since going back as far as 1.10

Symptoms are (as with the people above) disconnecting from the network and then locking up the system to the point where only the mouse will move, but the power button needs to be held to fix it.

Cheers

Alex

motulist · Post by **motulist** » Mon Jun 02, 2008 9:47 pm

I could be wrong, but I think that the problem may happen more frequently when iTunes or iPhoto is open at the same time as transmission.

Ryoujin · Post by **Ryoujin** » Mon Jun 02, 2008 9:53 pm

motulist wrote:OMG! Yes! Transmission has constantly been totally killing my Leopard! Worse, it doesn't seem like Transmission is to blame so I just thought my computer was dying or Leopard was a bad OS or something. The only way I even realized the problem was being caused by Transmission is that I though since my Mac kept crashing about once a day I thought my Mac was dying, so I started babying it, which meant no Transmission usage. After it seemed stable for a few days I figured all those crashes had cured themselves, then I started Transmission and sure enough a few hours later Leopard blew up again.

This is a terrible bug!

[...]

This is a MAJOR bug that MUST get the absolute highest priority attention.

Just for the record, such issue is not something that everybody is experiencing (at least I don't have problems like those, and I run under Leopard).

I'm not sure but it would seem that this is PPC related?

alexmuller · Post by **alexmuller** » Mon Jun 02, 2008 9:57 pm

Ryoujin wrote:Just for the record, such issue is not something that everybody is experiencing (at least I don't have problems like those, and I run under Leopard).

I'm not sure but it would seem that this is PPC related?

Ack, should've mentioned... I'm on a 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook

Waldorf · Post by **Waldorf** » Tue Jun 03, 2008 11:11 am

Are you all downloading to a network disk (eg. Airport Extreme)?

Or is there anything we should know you're doing differently from a "normal" setup? Like network disks, hackintosh, virus scanner? In short, anything not on a default mac, straight from the apple store, with default settings for transmission? (ok, maybe a bit more lax, but you get the point)

alexmuller · Post by **alexmuller** » Tue Jun 03, 2008 11:28 am

Waldorf wrote:Or is there anything we should know you're doing differently from a "normal" setup? Like network disks, hackintosh, virus scanner? In short, anything not on a default mac, straight from the apple store, with default settings for transmission? (ok, maybe a bit more lax, but you get the point)

OK, so to go into a bit of detail... these torrents are going straight to my internal MacBook hard drive, just as it was when I bought it. I'm using 2 Gigs of non-Apple (Crucial) RAM. Downloading over Wi-Fi through an 802.11n Airport Extreme base station (the latest model). I have it set to prefer encrypted traffic, but apart from that I can't see anything special at all. File sizes are anything between a megabyte and 200MB per torrent, with about 15 of them seeding, and for the most part they're from private trackers.

Hope that all helps somewhat - let me know if I've forgotten anything...

motulist · Post by **motulist** » Tue Jun 03, 2008 4:59 pm

Waldorf wrote:Are you all downloading to a network disk (eg. Airport Extreme)?

Or is there anything we should know you're doing differently from a "normal" setup? Like network disks, hackintosh, virus scanner? In short, anything not on a default mac, straight from the apple store, with default settings for transmission? (ok, maybe a bit more lax, but you get the point)

I'm downloading to an external firewire drive. Other than that I think everything is basically stock. I could be completely wrong, but I get the impression that the problem happens more frequently when iphoto or maybe itunes is also open (but that could just be coincidence). Maybe the problem seems to happen more with itunes or iphoto open because those programs are such resource hogs that seriously slow my Mac down when they're open anyway? Also I only have about 3 to 4 gig of HD space open on my startup disk (not my external download disk).

If I can think of anything else that might be relevant I'll post it.

10.5.3
powerbook g4
transmission latest version

Waldorf · Post by **Waldorf** » Tue Jun 03, 2008 5:17 pm

No weird system extensions, like peerguardian or some virus checker? Normal internet connection? I mean, no VPN, Proxies or SSH tunnel?

Are you (alexmuller, motulist) getting kernel panics?

alexmuller · Post by **alexmuller** » Tue Jun 03, 2008 5:32 pm

Waldorf wrote:No weird system extensions, like peerguardian or some virus checker? Normal internet connection? I mean, no VPN, Proxies or SSH tunnel?

Are you (alexmuller, motulist) getting kernel panics?

Nothing that strikes me as odd... no to PeerGuardian, antivirus and my firewall's off. It's just an Airport Extreme hooked up to a cable modem.

And it's not kernel panics - the screen stays the same, the mouse still moves and it's sometimes even possible to open the "Force Quit Applications" window. But anything more than that, including switching applications, just causes more and more of a beachball until there's nothing to do but power off.

Waldorf · Post by **Waldorf** » Tue Jun 03, 2008 6:54 pm

hmm. How about leaving the activity viewer open. That way you can see which processes are actually taking up lots of CPU / Harddrive activity.

Could you try this?