Transmission causes leopard slow death

[livings124]

Thanks TheBang, that was quite informative and probably the most useful post in this mess of a thread. But it does sort of confirm to us what we have been saying for a while - it is a result of the operating system.

[TheBang]

Another possible way to recover from the "slow spiral of death" (if, for example, Transmission is beach balling, and you can't get to the Preferences to unchoke the download limits), is to disconnect your network interface. I unplugged the ethernet on my Mac Pro, and after a few minutes, everything unfroze.

Just following up. Unplugging the network interface doesn't necessarily solve the problem, and, in fact, may have been coincidental when I did it before. I had more freezing (immediately) after turning on Speed Limit last night. I unplugged the network interface, and actually let it sit overnight (because I was tired and didn't want to wait for it to unfreeze), however, when I came back in the morning, the situation had not resolved itself, and all applications were unresponsive, requiring a hard reboot.

So, I don't understand why this problem only shows up some time. I have been using Transmission and Leopard and Speed Limit and Limit Total Bandwidth for a long time, and the issue never affected me until last Tuesday, and now it affects me all the time. Obviously, it also affects some people but not all. I can't think of anything in particular that I added or installed that would have suddenly started triggering it.

So, is there any possible solution to this problem? How do Azureus and BitTorrent 4.x and uTorrent throttle download speed without triggering this problem? How about older versions of Transmission?

[MarsArtis]

I'm apparently beeing affected by the some issue.
I just don't get frozen mac or beach ball but only disconnecting AIRPORT.

I've noticed this as soon as I started trying out the 1.50b1 and 1.50b2. After a few ours of use the airport connections drops and remain greyed out until manuallly selected.
So moved back to 1.40 (the latest release that performe well for me, grabbing a lot of peers and not dropping them). But the problem was there too. Too strange.

I've than deleted org.m0k.transmission restarded Transmision and set all the preferencees back.
Till now it's been running flawless. Started at 00:15 checked at 07:36 am and all is ok.

Powerbook G4 Alu, 1.33, 1,5Gb OSX Leopard 10.5.

[unisphere]

This had never happened to me with previous versions, but after the most recent autoupdate (and then subsequent nightlies) my system gradually slows to a crawl. i have not reached a beachball or freeze, but when the computer gets slow quitting transmission invariably solves the problem.

i'm on an imac g5 1.8 1gb ram, 10.5.6

[jakaj]

This problem has started appearing for me after I increased the maximum number of connections.

[Jordan]

If your router can't handle a large number of connections, then you need to lower that number.

[kidmidnight]

If your router can't handle a large number of connections, then you need to lower that number.

Have you read any of this thread? The 'slow death' bug ISNT a router problem. Other computers on the network still work fine. It only kills the computer transmission is running on. From what I've seen a fool proof way to get it to happen in the 1.50 release is to activate the speed limit or start limiting individual torrent speeds.

Please though, keep ignoring this bug or putting it down to overloading routers.

[Jordan]

If your router can't handle a large number of connections, then you need to lower that number.

Have you read any of this thread? The 'slow death' bug ISNT a router problem. Other computers on the network still work fine. It only kills the computer transmission is running on. From what I've seen a fool proof way to get it to happen in the 1.50 release is to activate the speed limit or start limiting individual torrent speeds.

Please though, keep ignoring this bug or putting it down to overloading routers.

Well done, attacking volunteers for their work.

If you've got the problem solved, could you submit a patch for it? Your access to the source code is much greater than my access to a Leopard box.

[oraguru]

Don't take it personal, there are some idiots who can't appreciate work of others, and as his username says... he's probably just a kid...

I have the same problem since a couple of days with my Mac (iMac 24", OSX 10.5.6, 3.06GHz, 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD, 4TB Synology NAS). I used since months Transmission 1.40 (or 1.42?) and last week I increased the maximum connections to 500, and believe me my big professional Netgear router can handle that. Everything was fine no problem... 2 days ago I upgrade to Transmission 1.5 and the problems started... I got those freezes, it disconnects all my network drives (and Transmission dl directly to those)... and the whole machine freezes and I have to hard reset it... did that more then 10 times in the last 2 days ...

Unfortunately, unfortunately around the same time I upgraded Transmission to 1.5 I installed the security package of Apple.. so I'm not 100% sure... But I would assume that it is Transmission...

This morning after another hard reset I fired up Time machine and restored Version 1.40 of Transmission... and started it (I'm downloading 15 large files at the moment)... it's (hopefully still) running at home, I'll see it tonight.. I'll let you know if I get home...

If it doesn't help I'll do the same as MartArtis suggested with deleting this org.m0k.transmission file (have to find that first)..

But I'll let you know.

Thanks for your wonderful work btw!

G

[kine]

I haven't seen this problem on my own machine (posted way earlier in the thread) in quite some time — not since i limited my max active downloads. It is pretty annoying to be limited to only three or four torrents at a time, but at least it works i guess.

However, i am at a friend's house this week, and i've upgraded his machine from Tiger to Leopard (archive and install on Core Duo iMac fyi), and... surprise, this bug affected him almost immediately. We've only had Transmission installed on here for a few hours and it's already locked up twice, with the same symptoms that've been mentioned countless times previously in the thread. Limiting max active downloads in this case doesn't help — he's only got one running, total, so... limiting it any more than that means not using Transmission (and he needs the bandwidth limiter because his connection is slooow).

So we have two different lines of thought i guess from the developers in this thread — some saying it's the router, some saying it's Leopard itself. In either case, this problem does not affect other clients like Vuze, so clearly even if there is some external problem it is possible to get around it. Also, if it is Leopard itself that is causing the problem, i think this is a pretty serious issue, because as far as i know Transmission is expected to end support for Tiger shortly. A BitTorrent client that locks up the only operating system it's designed to run on is, you might say, kind of a deal-breaker.

So, yeah, let me get out of the way 'blah blah it's volunteer work, you get what you pay for, just fix it yourself', &c., but if your user base is of any concern to you i think this issue probably needs to be the # 1 priority. If it's not, whatev, you're the boss(es) of course, but that's how i feel about it. :/

[Jordan]

A BitTorrent client that locks up the only operating system it's designed to run on is, you might say, kind of a deal-breaker.

So, yeah, let me get out of the way 'blah blah it's volunteer work, you get what you pay for, just fix it yourself', &c., but if your user base is of any concern to you i think this issue probably needs to be the # 1 priority. If it's not, whatev, you're the boss(es) of course, but that's how i feel about it. :/

I'm not sure where you get the idea that Transmission is Leopard-only.

I'd be interested in hearing if users still experiencing the Slow Leopard Death behavior could try out both nightly build r7800 and nightly build r7803, and post here whether one works better than the other with respect to this issue.

Also, I'd like to hear whether the people experiencing this are using external and/or networked drives, or if they're using faster internal drives. It would be interesting if there's a pattern there.

[kine]

I'm not sure where you get the idea that Transmission is Leopard-only.

Not is — will be. And that's based on this:

As of version 1.60, 10.4 will no longer be supported. All nightly builds are based off of 1.60 pre-beta code, and do not support 10.4.

Also, I'd like to hear whether the people experiencing this are using external and/or networked drives, or if they're using faster internal drives. It would be interesting if there's a pattern there.

I wasn't using one at home when i was having issues with it, and we're not using one here either. All 7200 RPM internal drives. I think if you look through the thread here we seem to have eliminated most of the external causes like routers and external drives. Some people have external drives or shitty routers/modems, but some definitely don't. The only 100% common factor i can see myself seems to be Speed Limit + Leopard.

I'll try the nightlies this week if i can.

[kidmidnight]

If your router can't handle a large number of connections, then you need to lower that number.

Have you read any of this thread? The 'slow death' bug ISNT a router problem. Other computers on the network still work fine. It only kills the computer transmission is running on. From what I've seen a fool proof way to get it to happen in the 1.50 release is to activate the speed limit or start limiting individual torrent speeds.

Please though, keep ignoring this bug or putting it down to overloading routers.

Well done, attacking volunteers for their work.

If you've got the problem solved, could you submit a patch for it? Your access to the source code is much greater than my access to a Leopard box.

Honestly? I appreciate you guys effort, but this thread has been going on for 17 pages now. It's cool if you dont know what is doing it. That's fine, what isnt is you popping in every so often to blame a router or the os or the persons computer or any of the other things that have already been eliminated 17 pages ago. There are even 2 reports of this in the 1.50 thread. As i and others have said before in previous posts (months ago) the common issue is the speed limit and/or connections. This brings the entire os to it's knees.

of course you will probably just leave a snarky comment about this and blame the hardware or a router but whatever.

[Jordan]

of course you will probably just leave a snarky comment about this and blame the hardware or a router but whatever.

Because snarky comments are off-limits to me, but are just fine for you?

I wish you had spent your time responding to this post instead.

[Jordan]

. A BitTorrent client that locks up the only operating system it's designed to run on is, you might say, kind of a deal-breaker.

I'm not sure where you get the idea that Transmission is Leopard-only.

Not is — will be. And that's based on this:

As of version 1.60, 10.4 will no longer be supported. All nightly builds are based off of 1.60 pre-beta code, and do not support 10.4.

Not to stray too far off-topic from this thread, but the world is larger than Tiger and Leopard.

Transmission also runs on Linux, BSD, Solaris, and other Unixen. The Daemon also runs on BeOS, the Networked Media Tank, and ...Windows.

I probably wouldn't've dropped Tiger support so soon, but it's not my choice to make. If any future post-1.60 bugs are found that also need to be fixed in 1.5x for Tiger users, we'll put out bugfix 1.5x releases for that.

Anyway, this is all as an aside. Leopard obviously is a top OS for Transmission, so it would be very nice to track this bug down.