Interface freezes and becomes basically unusable

[funkahdafi]

Hi,

my Transmission always has around 150 torrents seeding, and maybe 2-3 downloading. As soon as I add more to download, especially if those are large files (greater than 10 gigs), the Transmission interface becomes unresponsive, it takes 20-30 seconds before it responds to a single mouse click. Then it unfreezes for 1-2 seconds, just to freeze for another 10-30 seconds. To put it this way: The interface becomes unusable.

The same thing happens if I am downloading at high speeds (40 mbps and above).

It gets worse if the two conditions come together, e.g. I add new large torrents that are downloading at high speeds.

I've seen this behavior on the last couple of 1.7x releases, but I also saw this on earlier releases in the 1.5x branch. Some releases inbetween did not have that problem.

Seen on Mac OS X 10.5.x and 10.6 and 10.6.1 (so I don't think it's OS related).

Any ideas?

[linenoise]

Been noticing this as well. Very frustrating.

[funkahdafi]

Are the devs reading here, or should we open a bug ticket?

[jch]

What happens when you disable UPnP support?

[funkahdafi]

UPnP was and is disabled in my case. So that's not the problem.

[Jordan]

Is the hard drive grinding away when the interface freezes?

Does OS X generate a freeze report?

[funkahdafi]

Is the hard drive grinding away when the interface freezes?

Does OS X generate a freeze report?

No.

and

No.

[Jordan]

Does the rest of OS X freeze up too, or just Transmission?

Is the CPU running high during the freeze time?

[mata]

I have the same problem. Transmission UI now freezes with ~15% CPU utilization and ~5 threads. All other applications remain snappy. This started happening when I started downloading a few large torrents (~25GB).

The descriptions above match my situation - it freezes for 25 seconds, then unfreezes for 2-3. Activity Monitor lists the process as "(Not Responding)".

[funkahdafi]

It's only the Transmission interface that freezes. I have to correct my previous answer though: When it freezes, there is often hard drive grinding, but that seems natural because when the freeze occurs, it only occurs when downloading freshly added torrents and they start downloading at high speeds (as described in my opening post).

I can say this: It basically always happens when adding a couple of new torrents within a short period of time (say I add like 3-4 new torrents within 1-2 minutes). So I think this might be related to Transmission pre-allocating the disk space for the torrents or something like that. Because after a while, say like 30 minutes or so after adding the new torrents, the freezes disappear (while still downloading at high speeds).