Transmission causes leopard slow death

[Inuyasha]

tm slow death is potentially related to a flaw in darwin's handling of the disk cache which gets especially bad when using bittorrent and effects everyone regardless of your hard drive speed or ram size. to "flush" it try running the following noninvasive command (sudo not required)

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du -sx / > /dev/null 2>&1 & sleep 30; killall du

flush when the slow death is occurring, when your system has become very slow and tm is running.

edit:
though the problem will eventually reappear in a few minutes depending on your setup.

before


after

[kidmidnight]

a guy a few pages back already put up why it happens and a working fix for it.

[Inuyasha]

many people have claimed that the sysctl does not fix the problem. it certainly did not fix it for me. i noticed the same sort of behavior with my leopard xserve running rtorrent/libtorrent so i put that line in cron to run every 10 minutes and i believe it alleviates the problem though i am not certain until i do more testing. im just offering it up as a theoretical fix for people who are having trouble still.

[linenoise]

After not having an issue with this for a while it's suddenly back with a vengeance for me in 1.9x

I only have an issue with download speed limits in place fortunately but it's enormously frustrating.

[lamarsouine]

I don't know if this will help but here's my story :

By the way, I have a MacBook 1,83 GHz and I'm running 10.6.2 (upgraded the hard drive to a 200 and the memory to 2GB)

So, a couple weeks ago, my internet airport connexion started to act weird: I suddenly couldn't access Gmail and some other sites where my password is automatically set in Firefox. Also, Google searches where crashing all the time and some website would randomly stop loading. Thought the problem was Firefox so after I upgraded from Tiger to Leopard, I installed Chrome (no version for Tiger) because I don't like Safari but it was the same thing on the three browsers. My downloads on Transmission never had a problem, I was downloading aroung 400 Mb/s at the same time and since I plugged it with an ethernet cable when I was downloading (and the problem didn't appear when I was connected with a cable) I didn't make the connection. After messing with my router so much I had to restore default settings, I finally solved the problem (so I thought) by deactivating airport, deleting my airport connection and creating a new one.

BUT this week, I was late on my TV programs so I spent an afternoon downloading about 4GB of stuff. The same night, same problem reappeared with my browsers. this time, I made the connection between the use of Transmission and my problem (never had any system crash though but I think it was only a matter of time). After yet again messing with my router again, and my previous solution not working AND not finding a solution on the web, I ended up uninstalling Transmission, resetting the router and, again, deactivating airport, deleting the airport connection and creating a new one: BINGO! Problem solved, I access GMail in seconds, everything is back to normal. ( I thought uninstalling Transmission and restarting would be enough but it took all those steps to finally get it back to normal)

My understanding of it is that there's something wrong with the way Transmission deals with ports (I'm so amateur on that kind a subject so I might be wrong) and it kinda creates a conflict with the airport connection of my MacBook. I hope it'll be fixed eventually coz I reallllly liked Transmission. BitTorrent runs like crap on mac and bitLord, which I use on my husband's PC, doesn't have a version for Mac.

Anyway, hope this was helpfull but I don't know if my way to fix it will work for everyone who's having the same problem.

[Inuyasha]

i think the exponential growth of inactive memory slowly (or quickly, depending on your setup) displaces other running apps which slows your system down a lot and can cause it to beachball and become unusable after being left idle. these graphs arent perfect but the problem is immediately obvious regardless. this system was an intel mac mini running the latest nightly and snow leopard, however i have seen this problem present for ages and across platforms (G4/G5, 10.5/6). quitting transmission does not release the memory, you have to reboot or use purge which is a bad solution.

[kidmidnight]

the fix is a few pages back. its a shame the developers dont bundle it with transmission

[livings124]

the fix is a few pages back. its a shame the developers dont bundle it with transmission

Bundle modifying something system level? Not going to happen. It's a bug in Mac OS, not Transmission.

[Bonifatich]

It was quite a mind boggling problem for me so I took the effort to register to inform that in my case it appears the programme "TrusteerRapport" was causing the Mac OS X 10.5.8 crash with the latest Transmission 1.91+ or previous once.

After uninstalling "Trusteer Rapport" the Transmission works fine now without problems.

Perhaps programmes of such nature could cause such problems since they are security programmes created to cater for internet protections. Why I think so? Because I've noticed my "DropBox" programme was rapping my CPU after reboot which is also internet sync orientated programme and Activity Monitor showed ("rapportd"-was not responding--which was the TrusteerRapport's baby).

Anyway, once again, as soon as "Trusteer Rapport" programme was gone, all the problems with Transmission and DropBox are gone too in my system too.

My system: Mac OS X, 10.5.8, Transmission 1.91+

[addicted44]

I am experiencing this issue on Snow Leopard...Could it be affecting 10.6 too, or is it just bad hardware on my side?

Not sure if it works yet, but I am reposting the fix's link here...
http://forum.transmissionbt.com/viewtop ... 753#p36753

[veventoangel]

Thank you to all member i try it.

[Jordan]

I'm usually frightened to post in this thread, but could the people experiencing this "slow death" issue please try out a nightly of r10333 or higher?

[tonin]

For what it's worth, I was experiencing the same problem as described here, on Snow Leopard, the fix described before was working for me, but some other parameters are working as well. I'm currently running fine (using speed reduction at times) for 3 or 4 days with:

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net.inet.tcp.mssdflt=1400
kern.ipc.maxsockbuf=16000000
net.inet.tcp.recvspace=4000000
net.inet.tcp.sendspace=4000000
net.inet.tcp.win_scale_factor=8

Those are the recommended parameters to enable TCP high throughput, see http://fasterdata.es.net/TCP-tuning/MacOSX.html and http://www.psc.edu/networking/projects/tcptune/

BTW, OSX is also allocating TCP buffers dynamically, without any limited memory footprint, just like Linux does. A way to monitor those buffers is by using the command netstat -mm

I didn't try any nightly build to see if behaviour changed.

[pakkman781]

How would the posted "fix" affect online gaming? Bit of a WoW addict here

I'm having this trouble ever since I updated to 1.92, although going back to 1.91 hasn't helped. I have my speeds severely limited (30KB down/15 up). The only change I can think of that I've made is that I temporarily disabled delayed acknowledgements to try and improve my latency, but I did not create a conf file.

I used:

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sudo sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0

And I've had a problem since, but I do not know if it directly related.

EDIT: Also, I connect directly to my router via Ethernet, with Airport turned off.

[smajor]

I'm usually frightened to post in this thread, but could the people experiencing this "slow death" issue please try out a nightly of r10333 or higher?

FWIW, I'm giving r10415 a shot. I typically run it 24x7 and get the "slow death" about every 48 hours depending on my torrenting habits. I see if it happens with that nightly and report back.