Hi guys,
There's this thing that has been bugging me for a while.
I have quite fast Internet connection, 100mbit, and I'm able to take advantage of the entire bandwidth that I'm paying for.

When I, however, use Transmission as torrent client and download a torrent faster than, 7-8 Mbyte/second, my hard drive is spinning all the time and my desktop becomes sporadically unresponsive, load average gets high and...yeah...I'm pretty much sure the Transmission-application is the cause to this, somehow. It must be some strange way it cashes stuff...I don't know. I'm, either way, not experiencing anything like that with any other torrent client in Linux (or Windows for that matter).

It's not that I'm tied to Transmission, in fact, I prefer rtorrent and use it anytime I can, it's just that some stupid torrent sites are giving me Transmission as the only client option when I'm using Linux, so I have to stick to it those times.

I have quite fast system, Core Duo 3ghz, 4gb ram, 500 gb 7200rpm 16MB cache WD hard drive, etc...so the hardware certainly shouldn't be a problem.

Any idea why Transmission is behaving this way and is there a way to fix it?

Thanks in advance!

First of all, you should be able to use any torrent client you want. If you have to, you can download the .torrent file and open it manually with rtorrent, or whatever torrent client you want. The site you download the torrent file has no say. If you're downloading with a browser, you should be able to change the file associations.

But if you still want to use Transmission, just throttle the connection in Edit->Preferences->Speed.

I don't understand what you mean. I always get "torrent client not allowed" message on these sites when I load a torrent. I don't know how these things technically work but at some point the torrent client "shakes hands" with the tracker, and during that discovery, if it turns out to be one of those that aren't allowed to be used - I won't be able to download.

Your solution is also not a solution regarding Transmission client itself. You mean I should throttle (down) the speed? Why would I want to do that - lowering my bandwidth on purpose? I want to be able to download with 10Mbytes / second - that's what I'm paying for.

Performance wise you might be maxing out your HDD write speeds causing delays for other resources. It might also be the frequency with which the torrent client is updating the gui. Or your packet size is small for the given speed and that's causing a lot of overhead. Not really client related on 2 of 3 of those. throttling down should manage resources better. There's always alternatives like tons of ram and super fast raid arrays to lower the bottlenecks. If you're saving your torrents to a USB drive, you might consider saving them to the local harddisk and copying them over after they've finished downloading.

I use ktorrent. But my connection speed is only 100Kbps-ish. Wireless broadband. Beats dialup by a mile, but not really what most call broadband.

I have one browser that seems to automagically launch transmission. I get around that by wget-ing the URL for the .torrent file. For some reason the browser doesn't let me save as and get a usable result. A real PITB, but it might be a solution to consider. As soon as I track down what ties epiphany to transmission, it'd be nice to cut that cord myself. I'm not sure if it's that one, but the torrent file ends up in /tmp/ if you want to make a copy before removing it from the torrent client. Another PITB, but a little less typing than an URL on a terminal.

Ktorrent is nice but it's not allowed either on these sites in particular either. Pretty much only latest Transmission (regarding Linux-clients) is allowed.

It's really ridiculous, that I would actually need to do any of those things that you mentioned, especially getting an ultra-super-duper hardware only to be able to have a stable desktop during downloading of a single torrent at high speed Seems like Transmission is sucky application.

I've found that all of these stupid sites have Vuze (former Azureus) on their allow-list and the Linux port seems to be nice and stable. I'll test it for a while. If it doesn't cause me same problems - I'll use it as prefered bittorrent client in desktop environment every time I'm not allowed to use rtorrent.

Testing it now...Vuze is a bit better but it's still there as resource hog. Why is this happening?
Then it seems more this is "a Linux thing", maybe the way it caches the data. Yet it's still strange.
This problem doesn't exist in Windows at high speed downloads, no matter what torrent client I use.

Another application where I noticed this is actually the Unrar app. Unraring a 6 gb file in Linux takes 3x times longer comparing to Windows. Also I can pretty much go to kitchen and get myself a cop of coffee while it's unpacking in Linux as the desktop becomes totally unresponsive.

Do you have swap enabled?

swapon -s

Azureus was hideous when I last tried it. Nice features, but it's really hard to download anything if the app crashes every five minutes.

Of course my swap is on

I don't like Azureus either or Transmission for that matter. All this that I'm trying here is just "necessary evil" to be able to download from certain websites that have certain client demands. I would never, ever, ditch rtorrent otherwise.

I would need almost someone who has the internet connection as fast as mine to actually test and tell me the results.
The only friend I know with 100mbit is not experiencing these problems, but the dude has RAID 5 so his i/o performance is much more powerful either way.

Also, for the reference, when running hdparm -tT /dev/sda (my hd is a Western Digital 500GB caviar blue, 16MB cache), I get:

/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 12232 MB in 2.00 seconds = 6125.75 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 228 MB in 3.02 seconds = 75.60 MB/sec

Looks normal to me...and certainly good enough to handle around 10MB/sec from torrent download.

You can change the rtorrent source to make it identify itself as Transmission. Not sure about the details.

I'm not sure why any site would WANT Transmission. From what I've heard it used to have a horrible bug that screwed up ratios reported to ratio-enforcing trackers. I think that bug's now fixed, but still, what I see is sites saying don't use Transmission.

This sounds like a silly question, but have you been able to have rtorrent downloading at these fast speeds? (Since it's banned from some of the sites you're trying to use, maybe other torrents aren't running as fast anyway is what I'm thinking). Downloading at such a high rate may be more than your system can handle.

That said, I downloaded at similar speeds when I was at university, using hardware originally released in about 2001. (Albeit top-end workstation stuff when released). I can't remember what client I used, think it was Vuze, which while bloated was perfectly stable. Nowadays I use Deluge.

I've heard about that hack too. Don't know details either, but compiling rtorrent from the source is necessary. I'll look into it if every other option fails.

Me neither. The only conclusion I came to that they are idiots. I asked them about why allowing Transmission and for instance banning rtorrent, or Ktorrent for that matter. The answer was "insecurity" (as in rtorrent is insecure). Idiots.

Yep. I'm getting around 10 MB / second from a site that allows rtorrent - no problems whatsoever. I see load average going up a bit (around 0.45) and hard drive does do some extensive writing at points, but I'm not experiencing even a single "hick up" while surfing, playing back high-def video...no problem whatsoever.

So did I, few years ago - but even back then I used rtorrent so I can't compare

About the "security" - what it probably is is that they DON'T want clients like BitThief and BitTyrant. So they decide to whitelist only a small number of clients (which is a rubbish solution, and still ineffective, because the unwanted clients can just change THEIR identification).

Really though, it's akin to the bad old days of websites that refuse to give pages to Firefox.

$ uname -a
Linux localhost 2.6.26-2-686 #1 SMP Sat Dec 26 09:01:51 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux


Perhaps your system isn't optimized to your hardware. i.e. i386 on a P4 or better. Hardware wise you have me beat and I don't seem to have those issues. I've had similar issues if ripping a CD while trying the play other stuff from a USB drive. It could also be a 32 bit on a 64 bit system issue.


$ file /usr/bin/transmission
/usr/bin/transmission: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.8, stripped


Perhaps compiling it from source might optimize it better. My 4yo 32 bit 2GHz 0.5GB of RAM laptop doesn't have your woes. But I don't have your connection speed either (110Kbps / 2 meg ISP marketing terms).

Or it could be hardware I/O issues.


# cat /proc/ide/hda/settings


using_dma? current_speed?

I'm using UDMA/133
I've already posted my HD-transfer speeds (see my earlier posts).

I would really need someone who actually has same bandwidth as mine to post his/her experiences with Transmission.
I have 100 times more bandwidth than you do. When I only had 8mbit connection until last winter I didn't experience any problems. So no wonder that you are not experiencing anything weird with only 1mbit connection either. It's when I upgraded to 100mbit that I started experiencing this in Transmission. It's the download speed that causes this - faster than 5MByte / sec and Transmission becomes a resource hog.