I have an external HD devoted to torrenting. This weekend I switched from uTorrent and Deluge to Transmission 2.84 on my Mac running OS X 10.6.8 which has 16 GB of RAM.
The performance of Transmission seems better than the other software but Transmission thrashes the disk like mad, much worse than the other two clients I was using. So Investigated how to increase the cache size from the default of 4 MB in Transmission and found this page of documentation which describes the cache-size-mb preference and how to change it.
https://trac.transmissionbt.com/wiki/EditConfigFiles
I stopped Transmission and executed this command in the shell.
defaults write org.m0k.transmission cache-size-mb -int 256
and then to test if the value was set correctly I then did
defaults read org.m0k.transmission cache-size-mb
which returned
256
defaults read-type org.m0k.transmission cache-size-mb
which returned
Type is integer
Next I started Transmission again and checked the log file for messages about the cache size.
2015-01-25 18:01:48 +0100 cache.c:261 [Debug] Cache: Maximum cache size set to 4.00 MB (244 blocks)
Shouldn't it say 256 MB now? The external disk for torrenting still thrashes just as much, even a half hour after starting the application. The download and seeding speeds are acceptable but because I have 16 GB of RAM with few other applications running I would like to lessen the wear and tear on the disk. This is the only preference I have modified.
Can anybody help? Thank you.
Changed cache-size-mb in preferences but no effect
Re: Changed cache-size-mb in preferences but no effect
Thank you for the suggestion. I found the developer tools for my version of OS X (10.6.8) on the installation DVD and installed them (Xcode 3.2.3 and the 10.6 SDK). I then downloaded the source for the current release version of Transmission (2.8.4) by doing
Then I launched Xcode and opened the project file for Transmission. I set the SDK to 10.6 and clicked on "Build and Run".
The build failed with 657 errors and 748 warnings.
Could this be the problem? From https://trac.transmissionbt.com/wiki/Building:
Transmission has an Xcode project file (Transmission.xcodeproj) for building in Xcode. Make sure you have this software:
OS X 10.8 or newer
OS X 10.8 SDK
Xcode 4.4 or newer
Well, I cannot run that software. Only OS X 10.6.8 and Xcode 3.2.3.
Concerning the cache-size-mb preference, it seems like there is either a bug in the documentation or in the code. The documentation says it can be set as a preference but the code seems to ignore that? Should I submit this as a bug in the documentation or in the code itself? It would be very useful to be able to set this in the preferences (as documented) so that everyone can be spared having to rebuild the app to change one variable. Supposedly this was already implemented?
Thanks.
Code: Select all
svn co svn://svn.transmissionbt.com/Transmission/trunk Transmission
The build failed with 657 errors and 748 warnings.
Could this be the problem? From https://trac.transmissionbt.com/wiki/Building:
Transmission has an Xcode project file (Transmission.xcodeproj) for building in Xcode. Make sure you have this software:
OS X 10.8 or newer
OS X 10.8 SDK
Xcode 4.4 or newer
Well, I cannot run that software. Only OS X 10.6.8 and Xcode 3.2.3.
Concerning the cache-size-mb preference, it seems like there is either a bug in the documentation or in the code. The documentation says it can be set as a preference but the code seems to ignore that? Should I submit this as a bug in the documentation or in the code itself? It would be very useful to be able to set this in the preferences (as documented) so that everyone can be spared having to rebuild the app to change one variable. Supposedly this was already implemented?
Thanks.
Re: Changed cache-size-mb in preferences but no effect
Thank you very much x190 for your very useful tips. I followed your advice and was able to build just the daemon with Xcode 3.2.3 for OS X 10.6.8. It works fine and reads the settings.json file as you said.
The browser interface to the daemon is nowhere near as nice in appearance and functionality as the native Mac interface to Transmission. Any chance that cache-size-mb will become an option for the native Mac client too? If I were a programmer instead of just a user/administrator I would be glad to code it, but it's beyond me.
EDIT ---
Looks like someone already did it in 2013 but the patch was rejected
https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/5473
Apparently Mac users are not to be trusted with this setting, sigh
I added a comment to the requests thread viewtopic.php?f=5&t=14642
The browser interface to the daemon is nowhere near as nice in appearance and functionality as the native Mac interface to Transmission. Any chance that cache-size-mb will become an option for the native Mac client too? If I were a programmer instead of just a user/administrator I would be glad to code it, but it's beyond me.
EDIT ---
Looks like someone already did it in 2013 but the patch was rejected
https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/5473
Apparently Mac users are not to be trusted with this setting, sigh
I added a comment to the requests thread viewtopic.php?f=5&t=14642
Re: Changed cache-size-mb in preferences but no effect
Hello x190, thanks again for your support. I finally had some time yesterday to try your suggestion to use Transmission Remote GUI. I moved all my torrents from the native Mac app to the daemon which you gave me good instructions to build and so far it works very well. The Remote GUI interface isn't as nice as the native Mac application but it's much better than the web browser interface. And running Transmission this way lets me set the cache-size-mb to something much larger either in the settings.json file using a text editor or the preferences panel in the Remote GUI application. I have tested it by downloading several torrents and seeding several torrents at the same time. Now, instead of mad thrashing, my disk is wonderfully silent except for the occasional click. Marvelous. Thank you very much. 