I've been a big fan of Transmission ever since it came out. I think it used to be a fantastic, native BitTorrent client that was really easy to use for the basic stuff, but could do more when you needed it to. I think they still have the best interface for creating Torrents and the extra Mac native features like hot folders and Growl support are terrific… BUT.

My troubles began some months ago when my net connection started dropping intermittently. The connection only came back when I hit the “Renew IP” button on my router. At first I thought this was a router issue, so I tried with another one - same problem. Then the issue disappeared for a while and when it came back, I thought it must be our aging (~5 years old) cable modem not keeping up with the “modern day Internet” so I got a new one and for a while things seemed to work fine when ~a week later, same problem.

Then I started to suspect my ISP with whom I had also been in contact about this issue. Since they never had anything useful to say, I decided to ditch them and try another one. Just a few days after I had ordered the new ADSL line, I accidentally came across this Transmission forum thread…

Lesson learned

Lesson one, when troubleshooting a connectivity issue - always make sure there are no P2P apps running on the network. OK, even though the bug had cost me real money (the new modem and cancelling the ADSL subscription), I could only blame myself for not thinking of this sooner. Fine, I thought, all is well now… BUT.

Now there's a new problem - my downloads intermittently result in corrupt files - Transmission says the file is complete while 0.2 % of it is yet to be downloaded. Furthermore I'm seeing some really weird behaviour when downloading small (< 3MB) files - the progress indicator will sometimes actually start decreasing going back and fourth between 128K done and 46K… wth? :-)

So anyways, I felt like venting some steam. I really hope the team can pull it together and get Transmission back as the rightful king of BT clients on OS X. In the meantime, I'll be using BitTornado, which btw also has a GUI on OS X, just launch it using “pythonw2.5” (on Leopard). It looks absolutely gross, but it works, or you can use the curses or headless versions.

And yes, I should be filing bug reports instead of whining about it on by blog.