Transmission Freezes Intermittently

[jllaugh]

Hey all, I've been looking and looking for the solution to this for the last week and have not been able to find a specific fix.

Basically what happens it Transmission will simply throw up a SBOD every now and again, but very frequently. It doesn't seem to matter if I am just letting it download and do it's thing, or if I am trying to add additional downloads; upon observation it will still freeze up randomly (every 20s-1min) for about 15s-45s and then it will become operable once again. Integrity or reliability of downloads do not seem to be affected, but it is difficult, read: nearly impossible to make regular monitoring and managing and adding multiple torrents possible.

Every time I show the dock, Transmission will freeze once again for a while.

Using OS X 10.6.5 and Transmission 2.13; I've tried multiple builds and several other fixes and still cannot seem to make this go away. It was operating just fine not too long ago and just seemed to begin having this problem out of nowhere.

I do have an external hard drive connected to my AirPort Extreme that I use as a network drive to store all of my media. I have read this can cause intermittent freezing, but I'm not sure exactly how and it's never been a problem before.

Thanks so much for any help!

[jllaugh]

Additional note: I have tried using transmission remotely on my Mini which I use as a htpc/media server and the problem does not seem to appear. Versions of Transmission and OS X are the same and from the Mini, Transmission is still writing to the same network drive. Only issue that seems to be consistent across both machines are some slow download speeds though this may have to do with half a dozen torrents or so being downloaded at the same time.

Note that this problem still does exist on my iMac, the machine mentioned in the original post.

[MacProBob]

Read my thread....

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=11044

[jllaugh]

I will look that over more in depth in a little while.. thank you. I will say though, after reading the first couple of posts, while similar in some respects, we do not share the same problem. Transmission is not crashing my Mac, it is not even crashing at all. It is simply hanging, or, freezing for short/moderate lengths of time off and on for as long as it is on.

One torrent or many do not seem to have an effect on this issue, nor does Transmission need to be running for any length of time before it begins; once the app starts, so does the problem. Also, I am never in need of having to force quit the application; if I leave it alone everything will eventually download just fine, and at acceptable speed. What's the problem then, some may ask? Well, starting and managing multiple torrents at a time while others are downloading is an extremely tedious and time consuming task when it need not be.


I will continue to look at your thread and hopefully something will help in my case as well. I think in the end I would just end up using a different downloader than run a script to get around the issue. I really think it must be fixable as it doesn't seem to happen on my Mac Mini or my MBP and didn't even start on my iMac until very recently.

Thanks!

[Rolcol]

Probably hanging on file io. How fast are your torrents downloading? If the data is exceeding 2MiB/second, the cache is getting hammered.

[apanbanan]

Hello

i have had this problem for a long long time. I have T downloading to an external NAS. It first downloads in standard speeds (~7MB/s) till about up to 1 GB. Then it starts freezing intermitedly. Looking at the network traffic i've concluded that while it freezes it is transferring data to the NAS.

To sumarize it downloads chunks of data (I asume to the cache on my MacMini) and then transfers them over to the NAS and while it is doing this the program stops responding for a while (from 10 sec to 1 min).

I think the problem is the way it handles transferring data to the NAS as the problem does not exist when dling to internal drive. The data is not transferred continuously but in chunks.

Perhaps increasing the cache will solve the issue??

Giddy up

[MickAv8r]

I have the same problem on my MacMini HTPC with external FW attached drives with Plex as the media center. It's not a crash but the beachball. Its a new issue as this wasn't always the case, but I simply now cannot watch any videos at all while downloading torrents as the program locks the entire OS up as it's writing to the disk. This is definitely a bug because a disk write should not be maxing resources like this. Its not just Plex that is unusable, its the entire computer that locks up.

[apanbanan]

Hello again

Does anyone know how to change the cache size for the mac osx client? Is it possible?

Can't seem to find any preference file with that option in it.

[Tapper69]

My MacPro has been crashing via kernal panics and I have a hunch it's Transmission due to the below Console message. Only a hunch, not confirmed.

Code: Select all

1/18/11 12:09:09 AM	Transmission[1851]	*** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0x10031b5b0 of class NSCFNumber autoreleased with no pool in place - just leaking

[apanbanan]

Tapper69 i dont think this is a similar issue to what is described above.

[MickAv8r]

Downloaded build 3687 - no change in the issue. Still locking up the machine, though the lockups 'appear' to be of shorter duration.

[Tapper69]

Transmission may not be the culprit in my case. This is the last line in my system.log

Code: Select all

Jan 19 08:14:57 MacPro pcscd[42]: Non-smartcard device launched pcscd [Vendor: 0X4F9, Product: 0X181]

I then searched for that vendor and product ID in my System Profiler and linked those tags to my Brother MFC 7820N printer/scanner/fax. I am guessing this could be the problem as it is the last line of the system.log before the crash. I never had problems before with my Brother MFC. I do have a new Belkin USB 2 hub that I connected a few weeks ago. Confusing.