Transmission

Hi,

Just upgraded to v1.22 (build 6189) and noticed significant memory leak:

Each time the transmission runs for several hours, a large portion of memory remains unavailable for the OS X and other applications.
System Monitor shows this memory as Inactive.

Today it has wasted 1.94Gb so far (after runing transmission for 5 hours).
Last time when I let transmission run overnight, system had shown the entire 4Gb as inactive , leaving only 89Mb available for OS X and the rest of the apps. Needless to say, performance was next to nothing. System barely moved. Shutting down the transmission torrent did not result in more memory. That night transmission was the only aplication running on my Macbook. Had to reboot.
Like today: shutting down the torrent does not release the memory. Reboot helps.
I only run it on a Mac so can not tell about Windows.


Thanks I have 4Gb installed so don't have to reboot system every hour or so. Again, this behaviour started after upgrading to v1.22 (build 6189)
I don't know which version I had before, since I have not launched transmission for good two months before upgrading.

MACBook Pro (early 2008) with MAC OS X 10.5.4
Memory: 4Gb


Hope this helps to find the bug.
And thank you all programmers for developing such a great and simple software.
Cheers,
Randomsurfer

Please try a Nightly Build (link in my signature) and see if it's still there. The latest Nightly Build is 1.22+ 6360.

Reported here also. Are you getting messages in Console as well (/Applications/Utilties/Console.app)?

LH wrote:Reported here also. Are you getting messages in Console as well (/Applications/Utilties/Console.app)?

He's not using the latest Nightly Build, it could have been fixed already. Easiest thing to do is just download the Nightly and see if it's still there.

FWIW, I'm not seeing this in the daemon or the gtk+ client.

This is still present in 1.32 build 6453, and it's pretty bad, sucks about half a meg per second, which, oddly is the download speed as well. Perhaps they're related.

Ohhhh.... I missed where you mentioned in the first post that you were talking about inactive memory.

Here is an apple.com article that describes what inactive memory is, and why you shouldn't worry about it being high.

Jordan wrote:Ohhhh.... I missed where you mentioned in the first post that you were talking about inactive memory.

Here is an apple.com article that describes what inactive memory is, and why you shouldn't worry about it being high.

thank you for the link.
According to Apple, large amount of inactive memory should not be a concern. Agree. Clearly explained by Apple.
This, however, does not explain the effect of huge size of inactive memory on system performance.
When the amount of Inactive memory orders of magnitude larger than the amount of free memory, system performance degrades significantly.
According to Apple, MAC OS X would request more memory to be converted from inactive to free if needed. This does not happen however. The current version of transmission (1.33 build 6594) seems to have same problem, but in smaller magnitude. For Example, today, after the transmission run for few hours and was properly terminated, the amount of inactive system memory in my system equaled approx 30% of total memory. This is over 1Gb in my 4G system.
Now, notice that when I launch the Vmware Fusion which is a virtual machine where I run Windows XP inside, the amount of free memory is next to zero (I can dynamically allocate any size of memory to Virtual machine. In my case it 1.5Gb). This is the memory-hungry application. I assume that in this scenario MAC OS X desperately needs more memory for OS X environment. For some reason MAC OS X is unable to release more free memory from that 1+ Gb chunk of "Inactive" memory left behind by Transmission client. I remain suspicious whether Transmission handles it properly. In fact I do believe that an old bug is not completely fixed to date.
In brief: in my scenario, after transmission run for few hours 1Gb remains inactive, next I launch Windows XP as a virtual machine. The result: almost zero of free memory available to Mac OS X, degraded performance, and 1Gb+ of memory still inactive . Does not sound normal to me. So far i have not notice any other application leaving so much inactive memory behind as much as transmission leaves behind.
Note: Normally Virtual Windows XP does not noticeably affect the performance of my MacBook Pro. I am talking about decreased performance with huge chunk of inactive memory left behind by transmission vs same conditions but without having transmission run for hours prior to launching memory hungry tasks.
Something to think about here.

Please don't get me wrong. I like the application, not trying to blame developers, but respect their collective efforts. Could be just "MAC OS X problem" ???. Just see the issue that needs some more close attention in my opinion.
Thanks,
Pavel

According to Apple inactive memory is memory available to the os. There's not much more we can do with this, although we're open to suggestions.

This thread appears to be a duplicate of this thread. To reduce clutter and confusion in the forums, I'm going to close this thread and ask that the discussion be continued in the other thread instead. Thank you!