% of torrent downloaded going down, then up, then down, etc

[jbs1979]

I am new to Transmission and this is the first torrent I have downloaded using it, having used uTorrent and other torrent clients for PC quite a bit w/o issue. I have had it running for several days now and when I checked on it today I noticed it was at 3.86GB of 6.83GB complete, or 56.58% I could have sworn I had seen it at 57% the evening before, so I made a note of both numbers. I checked back shortly and sure enough Transmission said I had less of the torrent downloaded. Sat and watched stats go up, but then down again. It is now several hours later and Transmission is showing 3.83GB, or 56.09% of the download completed, meaning I have LOST data if those numbers are accurate. I haven't been getting great download speeds, but it's downloading at anywhere from 3kb/sec to 70kb/sec consistently. Even if it wasn't downloading at all I shouldn't be losing data already downloaded as the stats would have me believe. If anyone can explain how/why those numbers are going down and whether I should be concerned. Torrent is verified w/multiple seeds at 100%. I would be annoyed at having to scrap the torrent, as I've been waiting a few days for it, but I'd rather do that than wait for something that's never coming. Thanks in advance for any help

[mikeynl@gmail.com]

I've seen the same thing happen. An 8GB file was downloaded to 99.99%, transmission said it was just a few second to go, then it went to 100%, and jumped back to 99.94% and minutes to go. No idea why but I wouldn't worry too much about it.

[jbs1979]

Update: Left Transmission on overnight, and had even less of my download completed after it had been running for 8 hours or so. Checked stats deeper than I had before and saw that I had over 4GB of Failed Download, or more than had successfully downloaded. Have never encountered this using any other torrent app. Seems as though it's essentially spinning its wheels downloading failed data, whatever that means (again, never had this issue w/any other program). So, absent any support for this issue I have uninstalled Transmission and settled on Vuze, which is chugging along nicely at a much faster rate w/none of the issues I mentioned in my first post. Good luck, and here's hoping you fix this huge issue w/Transmission.

[cheule]

I've heard of torrent swarms that get poisoned. Apparently people either swap out data while seeding, or change the tracker servers, or something. I'm gonna be honest here and say I don't know much about it. But it sounds like what your are experiencing.

What I would do is start a different torrent, one that is likely to be OK. If you have no problems there, I would blame that particular torrent swarm.

[Debu]

I've seen that happen too - I'm guessing that the data is somehow corrupted. I think Transmission will download from a peer that is uploading bad data three times before it will stop trying. If it's a small, slow swarm, the process can take quite a while -- longer if you quit and restart, I guess. I eventually got all of that batch download - as I recall it was something like 10-12 GB - but it took something like 3 weeks.

What cheule says sounds plausible -- but for all I know the corruption could be caused by a bad connection, a bad hard drive or a failing flash drive.

Anyway, at least in my case the problem was the particular swarm, not Transmission.