Transmission

I am running Transmission on Ubuntu 10.10, and while it is a fine program, there is a nasty bug that rears it's head every week or so.

Basically, if Transmission does not shut down cleanly (which happens from time to time), the program cannot be re-launched unless the machine is rebooted. A transmission zombie process remains until reboot, and every time I try to launch transmission without rebooting, it tells me that it is already running. It is not running, however, only it's zombie process is running.

kill -9 does absolutely nothing. Only a reboot solves the issue.

In general, I am not a fan of apps that refuse to re-launch if they are already running, because this assumes a bug-free program that shuts down cleanly each time. As we all know, no such program exists, and as such, I would be thrilled to see program locks and such be phased out. In my experience, they do more harm than good. I'd rather have two instances of Transmission running and fighting with each other than have to make my machine reboot. I can solve the former by killing and restarting processes, while the later is a major pain in the rectum.

Otherwise, nice job on the app.

Ok, tested it by running the executable directly with no switches, no scripts, nothing else and was able to start 2 extra in addition to the one already running so Transmission itself does not check for already running ones so it's not a "bug" in Transmission. So this means that it's a "feature" Ubuntu has put into the init-script to prevent multiple instances from starting. The thing you can do is to remove the the pid-file when it goes zombie, which is most likely located under /var/run (or a subdirectory there).

Probably ought to report this to Ubuntu, then.

Transmission doesn't do any init scripts on its own, so it's not an upstream issue. If Ubuntu got the init script from Debian, then Debian should take a look at this.