Transmission causes leopard slow death

[cheule]

kidmidnight,

I stopped looking after I found four references to this being a leopard problem, not just a transmission one. I hope they suffice.

From this thread, regarding utorrent:
http://forum.transmissionbt.com/viewtop ... 255#p34668

From this thread, regarding Leopard to blame (triggered by transmission):
http://forum.transmissionbt.com/viewtop ... 315#p36085

Azureus causing Leopard panics:
http://6brand.com/kernel_panic_leopard_and_azureus.html

Blizzard's World of Warcraft having problems with Leopard Networking (incidentally requires the same fix that parodyr came up with for transmission):
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/threa ... 0840&sid=1

[cheule]

Kidmidnight, out of curiosity, what brand and make of router are you using? I ask because I saw a lot of transmission/leopard crashes go away for a friend after he switched routers of all things. Just wondering if this might be an element to the puzzle we haven't explored yet.

[kidmidnight]

oh god damn it. why would you ask what router im using? the router has nothing to do with the slow death bug that has been documented ever since this problem happened. We figured out exactly what was causing it months ago. Shit i think i put the reason on the 3rd or 4th page of this thread a year ago. And no, none of the things you linked are the slow death bug. The fact that you are talking about routers means you have no business even discussing this.

[livings124]

kidmidnight: You continue to ignore what you don't want to hear. I'm getting tired of this. If all you want to do is complain for the sake of complaining you will be banned.

[cheule]

kidmidnight, I have solved the bug for myself. I used Parodyr's solution, and it worked a treat. The only reason I'm continuing to read this thread is to try to help others out (read: you). The reason I ask about your router is because, as I just mentioned, a friend was having a similar problem with his Transmission as well and it turned out that his router was part of the problem.

We have evidence of this, as in, we switched routers and problem went away. Back to the old router, and the machine would get slower and slower until Transmission would beach ball. At this point it was completely unresponsive, even to ssh. If you wanna play along, I'd find it interesting if your router was by the same manufacturer. If it's not, no harm done.

This ISNT a router problem. The router still works fine. Other computers can connect and still surf the internet. This is an entire system beachball.

Here you mention that it isn't router related based on the fact that router is still up, and other computer can connect. What I saw with my friend's setup was that the router AND transmission AND leopard needed to be present to fire off the bug in the OS. Meaning if I swapped out the router, or used another app, or use Tiger, problem solved. But if you think it's impossible for a router to cause issues in Leopard, well you'd be wrong.

Again this may not be your problem, but it looks as if you've exhausted all the things you could think of. So again I say, wanna play along? (for the record, he was using a business class Netgear Router FVS318, and when he switched to a 2009 dual band version of the Apple Time Capsule, his 'slow dead bug' went away.)

When I read about this bug, which I'm inclined to think is definitely a Leopard networking bug that is exacerbated by Transmission, it reminds me of a hash function, many inputs with one output. What I mean is, we have tons of ways to create the problem, but the end result is the same, Leopard's networking code throws a fit. So this is why I am in agreeance with the Transmission devs at this point. It sounds like Leopard is what needs to be patched, not Transmission because it exposes a flaw in Leopard.

[mtskier]

sort of similar problem. everything beach balls for a minute or two. as someone else said, i can switch between windows, just not actually click anything. itunes freezes whatever its playing, firefox wont load the page ive clicked just before the beachball, etc.

everything is beachballed for a minute or two, then it pops back to running, but whatever torrent im trying to DL has some sort of error and i get the exclamation point. i hit resume and it starts dling again, only to beachball again at some random time later.

i havent had this problem with smaller torrents (under 1gb) it seems to be larger files that do it?...

[livings124]

mtskier: Did you even try reading anything in this thread? Did you try the proposed solutions?

[olk]

I would suggest still to remove timely limits from Transmission in OS X until the OS bug is solved (for example in Snow Leopard). There is just no point to keep the option there with no warning and let the dumb users just crash their Macs..

Just an idea..

[mezz]

Blizzard's World of Warcraft having problems with Leopard Networking (incidentally requires the same fix that parodyr came up with for transmission):
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/threa ... 0840&sid=1

I remember I had to tweak the sysctl like that in FreeBSD for wine+utorrent and other network applications. It was solved by add TCP socket buffers auto-sizing feature. I did tested the patch before it has went into FreeBSD and I no longer have to tweak the sysctl after apply patch. Same true for default FreeBSD 7.x and above installation. It looks like MacOS X needs to add like that feature.

http://unix.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists ... 00171.html
http://unix.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists ... 00099.html
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2008/02 ... sd-70.html

[Yidaki]

I'm a certified Mac technician of over 6 years and I had all the issues described on this thread of network slowdown, other apps continuing to work then after interacting with the computer a little, it fairly quickly crashing. I also had Yukon ethernet adapter errors in logs other's have identified. And usually coinciding with my scheduled times to change Bandwidth speed limits.

I eliminated hardware (looped hardware tests, HD surface scan, swapped RAM, ran computer from another hard drive) and most obvious software issues (archive/installed new OS, and running from another HD reproduced same issues).

Almost went back to Vuze begrudgingly as I really like Transmission especially for speed limits (have internet quotas where I live) and the web interface (monitor torrents from my iPhone when away but adding the hacks to my System Control conf file back on Page 23 reduced my half a dozen or more crashes per day to absolutely none-for at least 2 weeks now.

Thanks for the fix to an aggravating issue!

[bilinsky]

I can confirm that I also have this problem on leopard server using transmission 1.7.3. The computer freezed three times yesterday and in 20 minutes now in the morning , in fact it has died sooner or later every time I have started transmission. I really wanted to switch to a mac compatible client now (been using utorrent in linux for quite some time), and transmission have the features I want, but it seems less than alpha stable! The alternative is to use like several accounts with a utorrent client running in each of them.

[livings124]

bilinsky: read through the thread

[bilinsky]

Actually I wanted to ask if the sysctrl.conf fix should be applied to the newest transmission as well, but I forgot to mention that in the post ... Think I was a bit frustrated, switched to utorrent mac client later today and it has been really stable and fast. I remember that I tested quite many clients when I configured my linux serrver some year ago, and then the only acceptable solution performance wise cpu/torrent was running utorrent in wine. Azureus, deluge and transmission were not up to par. Editing system conf files to get a torrent client running in an acceptable way is not a good solution, are the devs using leopard at all?

[cheule]

Man this thread is an endless source of entertainment. I can see why livings124 is giving monosyllabic responses.

Billinsky, here I fixed your statement for you: "Editing system conf files to get Leopard networking running in an acceptable way is not a good solution"

[linenoise]

I can confirm this behaviour on 1.73 under an unmodified OS X 10.6 10a421a across multiple Macs.
Global limits work fine but the speed limit mode results in unresponsive applications or (usually) a Mac that has locked itself and thus a black screen with a beach ball.

Annoying because I was under the impression this wasn't the case in 10.6 earlier builds.

Edit: Just testing further. Sufficiently low *global* limits seem to cause this fairly quickly if you have large, well seeded torrents. 20kb/s limit on a 25mbit line and leeching a torrent that will max out the connection will lock a 24" iMac with 4GB in 10-15 minutes.

Edit: Also occurring with the latest nightly, build 8861.