Just a heads-up to my friends who use Transmission – 0.95 is extremely buggy. You’ll notice it using all your HD space, memory, becoming unresponsive and crashing, and writing bad data into your torrents (check everything you’ve downloaded with it). A terrible release and very worrying that it was released at all with such major problems.
I recommend immediately moving back to 0.94 (or even 0.93, but i’ve had no problems with 94) for now. I would also recommend adopting a (perhaps temporary) posture of suspicion towards this software – disable daily update checks and rely on manual updates a few weeks after release. You can review whether other users have had difficulties on popular Mac software review sites such as VersionTracker and MacUpdate.
You might think this is an overreaction but these kind of bugs should never make it into a public release, even a “beta”, and their presence sets off alarm bells. It’s pretty easy to imagine how, if bugs allowing uncontrolled file writing are allowed into a tagged release, bugs allowing unchecked file deletion might also creep in. Macs don’t really have a virus problem like PCs – but bad software can still delete all your files. This isn’t likely to happen but still – I don’t like the cavalier turn development of Transmission seems to have taken and recommend caution until sanity returns (and is confirmed to have returned over a few weeks of other people’s testing!).
UPDATE: The problem of data corruption is supposedly fixed in 0.96, although the speed problems remain. I’m thinking I’ll hold off a bit before moving from the highly reliable (in my experience) 0.94.
Tags: m0k, transmission
December 12th, 2007 at 10:29 am
Thanks for the heads-up. Just having gotten a Mac mini to my new apartment I was looking around for torrent clients, after having seen the disaster that the official client has become. I eventually downloaded Tomato Torrent, though I haven’t used it for anything yet, going to download Transmission 0.94 as well.
December 12th, 2007 at 8:17 pm
0.96 is already out and apparently fixes the “bug where dragging non-torrent files over the main window could cause excessive memory use”. Not sure if that’s the issue you’re seeing or not.
While I agree their quality control could be better, I think the rules are a bit looser for pre-1.0 releases. I mean, the whole point of the version number is “it’s not done yet”.
I briefly tried Transmission on your recommendation a while back, and while the user experience is much, much better, I found that my transfer speeds were much worse than with Azureus. In the end I concluded that this was most likely not due to technical reasons; rather, I think people filter and block Transmission on the basis that it used to have a rep as a bad client.
So I switched back to bloated old Azureus. Slow, resource hungry, ugly, but dead reliable.
December 14th, 2007 at 9:51 pm
Wincent, that may have been another bug but I didn’t experience it. I experienced rampant cross-torrent file corruption – generally if you had 2 torrents running, one with say a single video file of 190M and the other with a more complex folder of RAR files or whatever, the RAR files would be corrupted with junk data up to the size of the movie – without Transmission noticing. This caused huge losses in disk space, wasted download time (and, in Australia, quota!), a whole lot of lost time and annoyance as I troubleshot the problem, and further annoyance as I sat down to watch videos I thought were completed but which turned out to be indecipherable junk data.
I am aware it’s pre-release, sub-1.0 software – and also that’s it’s free. But it’s been in development a long time and through many versions – and 0.96 is pretty close to 1.0! I consider wildcat (silent!) data corruption a very serious bug, one which could be a lot worse with very little imagination, and as I mentioned I lost a lot of time because of it. Not trying to be all “me me me me me” here but just saying I’m going to be a lot more cautious with upgrades in the future.
Curious that you experience slower speeds with Transmission – it used to be slow, but that seemed to have been resolved (until the latest screwup!) and the speeds I typically get are indistinguishable from Azureus. I know its UPnP/NAT configuration is not as strong as Azureus, but that tends to be a “it either works or it doesn’t” type of problem, and it works for me. I also tend to place my primary computer in a DMZ if supported by the router, which can help speeds.
Azureus is just too annoying for me to leave running while I try to do other things. I’m short on memory and just can’t spare the 3 or 4 hundred MBs it can take after a while – plus it’s much more disk-intensive, as far as I can tell. If I had another machine I could dedicate to BT I’d probably run it on that, but since I don’t I choose Transmission. Word on the Java Street is that Java 6 is much more efficient, and so if and when Apple sees fit to port it to OSX I might try Azureus again.
I do recommend giving it another try – it had been really good up until 0.95, which perhaps explains my level of disappointment! No doubt it will be good again soon – just pay attention to the VT reviews before upgrading, recommends I. God knows we need a decent native BT client on the Mac. Transmission’s our best hope for that, especially if like me you plan on never giving a single cent to that greedy cunt David Watanabe.
January 8th, 2008 at 10:52 am
Transmission has now updated to 1.0 and I’ve switched to that without issue. Great program again.
January 8th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
It might be a great program, but I still think it suffers from its reputation as a “bad client” in the past (many people still block it, so your transfer speeds may suffer).
January 10th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
I haven’t experienced that at all – not that one would notice, I guess. I notice no speed difference between Transmission and Azureus if the tracker is up – and even if it’s a little faster, whatever, I’m usually in no big hurry.
What still stands strongly in Azureus’s favour, however, is its DHT implementation – on public torrents, if the tracker is down (or in addition to it if it’s up) the client can connect to other peers directly via a distributed tracking system. Azureus is very good at this, Transmission is hopeless at it and rarely if ever manages to connect. This has been particularly noticeable since the demise of demonoid; a great many demonoid torrents are still floating around, sustained solely by the DHT system. Azureus is able to connect to these orphan torrents, Transmission is not. Thus Azureus remains an important part of the toolkit, though I don’t like firing it up unless forced to by the above circumstances.