Should Transmission Be Connecting When Paused?

[nervenet]

My Little Snitch network monitor keeps going like the Energizer bunny EVEN when all my transfers are paused. Is this normal? I've tried pausing all but one, and that does seem to lessen the number of hosts it is somehow connecting to. Is there some kind of activity going on that torrents need to do even when paused? The addresses seem to be from all over the world.

[nervenet]

If you have PEX and/or DHT enabled, Transmission will be more talkative than a hen party.

Thanks for the quick reply. A little googling of the acronyms you've used has helped me learn a little more about bittorrent and its history and possibilities. I now understand a bit more what's going on.

So the question evolves: my Prefs for Transmission under the Peers tab have both these checked, as in "yes, use":

- Use peer exchange (PEX) for public torrents
- Use distributed hash table (DHT) for public torrents

Problem is, all 33 of my transfers presently in Transmission are supposed to be PRIVATE. So I've used the Inspector to view the Torrent Information for these and now see that each of these torrents show under the label "secure":

"Private Torrent, PEX and DHT automatically "

So does this mean that each individual torrent can have a setting which enables PEX and DHT, overriding a global setting. Because my global settings, as noted above, are set to allow PEX and DHT only for PUBLIC torrents. I presume this particular bit about "PEX and DHT automatically" is an attribute of the torrent, or the tracker, or something--as I didn't make this setting myself.

Should I change the settings on these private torrents to turn PEX and DHT off--is there even a way?--or is that something I don't want to do as it is part of the way these things function?

[nervenet]

Turns out the "inspector" window was cutting off the word "disabled" when I looked at each private tracker. When I expanded the "inspector" window a bit to the right the word "disabled" appeared, on all of them. There were no ellipses (...) after the word "automatically" which would have alerted me to the fact that the information I was seeing was incomplete.

So what this means is that all these private trackers are, as you pointed out they would be, set with PEX and DHT disabled. So WHY is Transmission continuing its "hen party" clucking with ALL private torrents (the only ones in Transmission) paused? What IS this activity?

I just tried quitting Transmission (all torrents paused) and the activity stops (no surprise there). I launched it again and the "hen party" starts up again. Occasionally the domain of the location where all the trackers come from (they're all from one place) shows up as being accessed, along with the myriad of ip addresses, and occasionally the "Mac OS X Kernel" seems to be accessing some of these same IP addresses. I saw some other threads that seemed to suggest (in an alarmed tone) that Transmission enabled some kind of background use of the kernel. I'm not tech savvy enough to understand all that, but maybe that's what's happening.

All private torrents, PEX and DHT disabled, are PAUSED at the moment; the "hen party" is continuing without abatement. If I switched to a different torrent client would that put an end to this? Is it something I should be concerned about? If not, I'd just like to know what IS happening so I can stop thinking I'm part of some hacker network.

Still seeking answers; appreciate your help, x190--and the help of anyone else out there who might chime in.

[Thanks for the "Help!" lyrics; I loved how Techspansion simply quoted John Lennon in their Help menu too!]

[nervenet]

Well, I don't know what's doing all the exchanging if the torrents are paused AND they're supposed to have that DHT/PEX stuff disabled. I'd block the stuff if I knew what the heck it is!

L'il Snitch is the very opposite of a buggy app. One of the best!
______________________________________
You tell lies thinking I can't see,
You can't cry 'cause you're laughing at me.
I'm Down.

[nervenet]

As I've been saying, I ONLY have private torrents loaded in Transmission presently. I've checked every one of them and they all have PEX and DHT disabled, as expected of private ones. That's why I can't understand the activity when they are paused.

[Jordan]

Coming into this thread a little late, but I can back up what x190 is saying here.

I think maybe the thing to understand, that will make this make more sense, is that being part of a DHT network involves more than having public, running torrents. Even if all your torrents are private and/or paused, you are still a node in the DHT network and are passing peer A's messages along to peer B. It's not a high volume, but if I understand LS correctly even a few bytes is enough to ring its bell

Anyway, if that's what we're talking about here, it's a feature, not a bug. But if the network activity bothers you, just disable DHT to make the DHT noise go away.

[nervenet]

Thanks for the further explanation. The activity hasn't been bothering me; I can easily hide the network monitor. I just couldn't understand what all the activity was about and wanted to be sure it was to be expected. Can't be too careful! I would imagine Little Snitch would show just 1 byte of activity, that's its job.

Thanks again to x190 and yourself. Much appreciated.