Is there any torrent-clients for Mac that actually won't freeze during "heavy" load?

[RamGuy]

So I tried to move my torrent usage from my desktop running Windows over to my Mac Mini 2011 model running as a 24/7 server today.

I grabbed Automatic (awesome application!) and created filters to use with any torrent-client out there, whether it got RSS support or not to automatically download all my regular stuff the second it's available.

The problem is that my torrent client of choice under OS X (Transmission) isn't allowed on many private trackers with the latest 2.50 release because of some awkward issues reported. So I'm stuck with the older 2.42 release which hangs and gives me beach-balls every time I try to download more than a few torrents at once. It works just fine the first few seconds, or even minutes with 4+ torrents loaded but after that it just hangs and I have to force quit it to get it back up and running but after a few seconds to a few minutes it all happens again. It works perfectly when I have less that 3-4 torrents, but more than that then it's a no-go it seems.


Same goes for the latest µTorrent for Mac (2.0.2), which seems like a buggy client in the first place anyway, but tossing more than a few torrents into the mix and it freezes as well. µTorrent for Windows (keeping with good old 2.0.4) is doing just fine no matter if I toss 2-3, or 50-100 torrents at it at once.

All data is saved on a file-server measuring a steady 90-140 mbps write performance over dual-link LACP connection, so shouldn't be much problem there either.



So which client for Mac is able to handle some traffic without freezing?

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Does Transmission stop hanging after a while? Because it hangs/does not react, when it writes the actual data to HDD, which can take a while depending on the size of the torrent and the location it is stored on (internal HDD, external HDD (USB, Firewire, LAN).
I used Transmission with dozens of torrents at a time and it was good, only when it wrote data to the location it stores in, did it hang.

 

[RamGuy]

It might be, but it was stuck frozen for about 30 minutes and considering I had only five torrents running and only two of them could have been able to finish in that time frame it would have to spend over 10 minutes writing / copying a 400-600mb file over to my file-server which normally have transfer rates of about 90-140MBps.

That seems highly unlikely. And Transmission shouldn't be caching the data on the local hard drive before passing it onto the file-server? So wouldn't it be writing data every time you actually download a torrent? Or does it cache it onto the hard drive and don't start moving it into the destination folder until it's all downloaded?

If it does indeed freeze every time it transfers data that might explain it, but that seems like a somewhat silly feature to have. Why not toss everything directly to the designated folder to begin with?


EDIT:

The webui is also inaccessible while it freezes on my Mac Mini, that might sound logical but to me it seems like every time it freezes it actually doesn't do anything at all. If I crash it and fire it back up again all torrents are suddenly back five minutes so lets say Torrent A actually finished five minute before it force, it's back at 80% downloaded after I crash and re-start it. That seems quite awkward considering downloaded data is downloaded data, right? And in this case I could actually watch the entire episode I had downloaded before I crashed it, even though Transmission claimed it to only be 80% downloaded when I fired it back up after I force quit it. That doesn't make much sense.

 

[RamGuy]

I see a clear pattern here, it all freezes when one of my episodes are just finished downloading.

Currently I've got three torrents running, one huge one and two smaller one. The two smaller ones are about 500-600mb and exist of one episode of a TV-show. Episode 1 finishes without any issues, and about one minute later episode 2 finishes and then Transmission instantly freezes.

If I crash it, it all suddenly jumps back in time where there is about 20% left to download on both episodes for some awkward reason (all the data is already on the file-server and working?!), episode 1 finishes without any issues again, but the moment episode 2 hits 100% it freezes.

Now if this is a matter of Transmission freezing while transferring / writing data, then it freezes for way longer than the actually transferring takes. Considering the normal transfer speeds to my file-server and the fact that we are talking about a single 400-600mb file here it should take under a minute for Transmission to write, transfer or whatever it's doing. But still it freezes for over half an hour?

And of course, when I force quit and fire it back up we are just heading into the exact same loop over and over.

 

[aidalai]

Hi RamGuy. Im having the same problem since years... Have you ever find a definitively solution?

Thanks.