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JangoFett124

macrumors regular
Jul 16, 2002
176
15
Can you elaborate on what features are missing? As far as I can tell, Transmission has all the features uTorrent for mac currently has plus more.
 

motulist

macrumors 601
Original poster
Dec 2, 2003
4,235
611
I never really liked transmission, i guess if you want an extremely simple app that downloads torrents, its for you. But i would rather have the features and the interface of Vuze. Utorrent worked great for a while for me and then with the new update the downloads would stop every 5 minutes, making it impossible to do anything. Vuze has worked great so anyone trying to find an alternative torrent client, try Vuze.

I second this. I just started using Vuze, and it blows transmission out of the water.
 

CaptMurdock

Suspended
Jan 2, 2009
577
1,992
The Evildrome Boozerama
Transmission wasn't causing me any problems until I upgraded from 1.33 to 1.72. My iBook would lock up and I'd have to reboot. Reinstalling the earlier version took care of that problem.
 

yezza

macrumors 6502
Mar 12, 2008
259
23
I stumbled across this thread, and coincidentally one of my 500 GB WD HD's (RAID 0) recently started clicking on waking. I was also experiencing lock-ups with Transmission occasionally. My OS started freezing with the spinning beach ball of death, took one last breath then died. I've since replaced the 2 500 GB drives with 1TB Spinpoints in RAID 0 again (and thank @#$% for my TM back up!).

Since then I've noticed blatant internet speed problems when Transmission is running. For instance, I had 2 torrents downloading at a measly ~10kb/s max, and couldn't even load a macrumors page. As soon as I shut Transmission down, everything in Firefox loaded as per normal speed. Also note that this is using 1.72

In the year that I've been using Transmission, I've always had problems with it as far as I can remember - ie freezing, affecting my internet connection to the point of ridiculous, and always having to force quit.

I really don't know whether it's Transmission or purely coincidental, but after shelling out a wad of hard earned cash on two new drives, I'm going to steer clear of Transmission for now :(
 

Yidaki

macrumors newbie
Jul 5, 2009
17
8
I do find that Transmission pretty much takes over my internet connection but I don't really care about that--I only use Transmission when I'm not doing other stuff on the Internet--all other computer functions are fine. I don't limit anything on Transmission and it seems to work just fine as far as stability is concerned. I've used it for about 6 months.

Any bittorrent client (with a decent amount of torrents going or even just 1 high-activity one) is going to take over your internet.

This is the beauty of bandwidth shaping during usage hours. All of the top 3 clients have (Vuze, Transmission, uTorrent).

Yes, I've been keeping my eye on uTorrent - I know it's the best on Windows but just waiting until it's as feature rich as the Win version and out of beta to take it seriously. In the end I'm a big fan of open-source software so still glad to have the feature-superior Transmission running like a champ again :-D
 

BlueRevolution

macrumors 603
Jul 26, 2004
6,054
4
Montreal, QC
I actually have had a noticeable speed increase when using Vuze over transmission and utorrent. I also enabled port forwarding on my router and that has helped tremendously.

I suspect it was your port forwarding rather than client switch that made the difference, but regardless, I was referring to Vuze's dubious status as the most memory-intensive BitTorrent client in common use.
 

-tWv-

macrumors 68000
May 11, 2009
1,583
2
Ohio
I suspect it was your port forwarding rather than client switch that made the difference, but regardless, I was referring to Vuze's dubious status as the most memory-intensive BitTorrent client in common use.

I suppose you are probably right, and it probably hogs more memory than I notice but I upgraded my macbook to 4gb so I don't notice the memory hogs anymore because my memory is never completely taken up. Transmission or Utorrent are probably better solutions if you need a lighter program.
 

flatfoot

macrumors 65816
Aug 11, 2009
1,010
3
Solution to OP's problem

Sorry to revive an old thread here but I just wanted to share:

A few days ago I switched from XTorrent to Transmission because XTorrent continuously locked up my system like the OP's (albeit with him it was Transmission).
Unfortunately, Transmission caused the very same effect. With both, XTorrent and Transmission, it didn't matter how many torrents I was currently loading, just one or twenty.

After a bit of thinking, I disabled the auto-port-forwarding in Transmissions's prefs and set it (the forwarding) up manually in my AirPort Extreme base station.
Transmission has been running for about two days now without locking up my system. I like its small CPU footprint but I think I'll give XTorrent, which is more CPU demanding, another try because I like its integrated search.

I hope it'll tun out that the forwarding was really the problem. This would also explain why some users don't have problems and others do – might depend on the router you are using. I had this problem with my old NetGear router, too.
 

OZMP

macrumors 6502
Feb 18, 2008
321
0
Its a shitful unstable app.

uTorrent seems to be most stable. I was testing apps to try and reproduce the issue and Transmission is ****. Light but unstable.

Here's a better idea, don't use torrents!
 

motulist

macrumors 601
Original poster
Dec 2, 2003
4,235
611
Vuze is the way to go. It's a tad slow interface-wise, but it's solid as a rock. It's never crashed on my system. And it's certainly never crashed my whole computer like Transmission did.
 

flatfoot

macrumors 65816
Aug 11, 2009
1,010
3
Solution to OP's problem

Sorry to revive an old thread here but I just wanted to share:

A few days ago I switched from XTorrent to Transmission because XTorrent continuously locked up my system like the OP's (albeit with him it was Transmission).
Unfortunately, Transmission caused the very same effect. With both, XTorrent and Transmission, it didn't matter how many torrents I was currently loading, just one or twenty.

After a bit of thinking, I disabled the auto-port-forwarding in Transmissions's prefs and set it (the forwarding) up manually in my AirPort Extreme base station.
Transmission has been running for about two days now without locking up my system. I like its small CPU footprint but I think I'll give XTorrent, which is more CPU demanding, another try because I like its integrated search.

I hope it'll tun out that the forwarding was really the problem. This would also explain why some users don't have problems and others do – might depend on the router you are using. I had this problem with my old NetGear router, too.

I switched back to Xtorrent from Transmission (which was absolutely stable for me) as planned and just as Transmission, Xtorrent runs like hell without freezing my system.

The auto-port-forwarding really seems to be a problem with some routers.

I hope this post will help some people in the future.

BTW: I wasn't asking for advice on which app to use...

EDIT: I'm back at using Transmission. Xtorrent's developer releases a new version every other day but hasn't managed to make it stable in years – and I paid for that (cr)ap(p)... At least, now that I don't let it auto-port-forward it does no longer freeze the whole system. :rolleyes:
 

GGJstudios

macrumors Westmere
May 16, 2008
44,556
950
I haven't had a single problem with Transmission.
Ditto! It's been working fine for me for close to 2 years. Funny how when one person has a problem with their computer, they look for a few others who have experienced something similar and then they jump to the conclusion that the software or operating system is the culprit. It doesn't seem to matter to them that they represent less than 1% of all users, or that common sense suggests that if the software is the problem, that ALL users of the software would have the same problem.

So many times we have seen threads saying something like "Mac OS X sucks!" or "Safari is crashing my system!" or "TextEdit is eating all my RAM!", only to have the OP come back later and sheepishly admit that they forgot they installed some XYZ plug-in or add-on or pirated app or system modification/customization that caused the problem.

If an app has a flaw that causes a system to crash, ALL users of that app on the same OS will experience the same issue. The argument, "If you haven't experienced this problem, just give it time. You will!" doesn't hold water, either. It's like former Windows users coming here and saying, "OMG! My Mac has a virus!", because they pressed some key and something unexpected happened.
 

ttang

macrumors newbie
Sep 30, 2009
2
0
Well, I really like Transmission as it seemed so much better than Vuze for a while. A long while, but the somewhere in the last six months it crashed my iMac in a way that affected my hard disk.

I won't go through the details because it seems that there is enough evidence from other users but I eliminated tons of variables and even installed clean installed a new 10.5 system twice and it came down to transmission factor.

So now I'm back to Vuze and maybe I might give utorrent a try. At least when Vuze was crashing it took down only itself. This Transmission bug crashes my iMac HARD.
 

newyorknight

macrumors newbie
Feb 26, 2008
7
0
With Transmission, can someone reach in and steal your files?

Hello. I am sure this question has been asked before. I have been a happy Transmission user for years now. No problems. But I do wonder if a leecher has the ability to grab files that are either not listed in the Transmission window, i.e. a file that you have already downloaded with a torrent, or if a leecher can go outside that local folder, reach in and steal other files?

Many thanks!
 
Hello. I am sure this question has been asked before. I have been a happy Transmission user for years now. No problems. But I do wonder if a leecher has the ability to grab files that are either not listed in the Transmission window, i.e. a file that you have already downloaded with a torrent, or if a leecher can go outside that local folder, reach in and steal other files?

Many thanks!

No, they can't unless you allow it.
 

mac88

macrumors 6502
Aug 7, 2008
477
2
Boston, MA.
No, they can't unless you allow it.

Dan, I believe there is no way that someone can accomplish this through Transmission. As BlueRevolution stated, what you have uploaded is the only item that an individual has access too. If I am wrong, let me know so I can stop using that program.
 

Makosuke

macrumors 604
Aug 15, 2001
6,748
1,437
The Cool Part of CA, USA
But I do wonder if a leecher has the ability to grab files that are either not listed in the Transmission window, [...] or if a leecher can go outside that local folder, reach in and steal other files?
Both of those things are completely against the entire BitTorrent paradigm and fundamental system. If it allowed either of those things, not only would it be some other kind of file sharing client (along the lines of Limewire and its one-to-many kin), but it would be an abomination from a security standpoint. There wouldn't be a single person using it the moment someone realized it had a flaw like that.

Personally, I've never had the slightest problem with Transmission in occasional use over the past couple of years. It's been running steadily for most of the last two weeks on a couple dozen gigs of fansubs without so much as a hiccup.

I used to use Vuze back when it was called Azureus, but while a few of the remote-control features and the incredible amount of information it allowed were nice, Transmission is drastically cleaner from an interface standpoint, much nicer looking, and does everything I actually need it to just fine.

Sounds like other people have had trouble with the feature, but I like its ability to randomize the port on startup, and open said port on my AEBS via UPnP. The closest thing I have to a complaint about it is that it isn't (at least, as far as I can tell) quite as aggressive as Vuze about caching so as to reduce disk access.
 

soms

macrumors 6502
Dec 10, 2007
412
12
Seattle
While I haven't had any serious issues(like the OP had), I have noticed that Transmission does tend to freak out more than any other torrent program I've used.

Case in point when dealing with large files: Transmission will REALLY eat up ram and go unresponsive at times.

I'm thinking I might go back to Vuze for a bit, but I really like the look of Transmission.

And yes, as others have stated, Transmission does tend to access the HDD more than any other torrent program. I'm beginning to think it MIGHT be what's causing my HDD to make clicking(almost like waking from sleep*tick tick* sounds) every once in awhile.
 
No they can't, period. There's no option in Transmission to allow people to browse your hard drive. People can only access what you have deliberately made into a torrent and uploaded to a BitTorrent tracker.

Dan, I believe there is no way that someone can accomplish this through Transmission. As BlueRevolution stated, what you have uploaded is the only item that an individual has access too. If I am wrong, let me know so I can stop using that program.

You are both correct, that it what I was trying to say, they can't get random files only one's you allow. :)
 

Xtremehkr

macrumors 68000
Jul 4, 2004
1,897
0
There's probably a good reason why people use Transmission over XTorrent, but I've found XTorrent to be awesome.
 
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