Transmission 2.0 Release is "Faster, Smarter"

Transmission 2.0 Release is “Faster, Smarter”

Written By Jared Moya

June 21, 2010 | 1 Comment

Popular open source BitTorrent client for Macs and Linux releases updated version with code that is “faster and smarter” than ever.

Transmission has long been one of the more popular BitTorrent clients for both Mac and Linux users. The open source client is lightweight, feature-filled, and sports a simple, intuitive interface designed to integrate tightly with whatever computing environment you choose to use.

It has just released a new stable 2.0 version that its developer claims is “faster and smarter” than ever.

“Transmission 2.0′s code is faster and smarter,” Transmission developer Charles Kerr told TF. “We’ve profiled the code for CPU bottlenecks and removed them. Startup, peer management, blocklists, and verifying local data are all faster. Transmission 2.0 is also smarter about detecting and handling network lag.”

“For 24/7 remote seedboxes, headless systems, and embedded systems, we’ve made Transmission-daemon easier to build, added hooks for scripting, and shrunk the memory footprint. Transmission-daemon has one of the smallest footprints — if not the smallest — of any BitTorrent client.”

That’s really the key to Transmission’s popularity — small memory footprint. It’s the same reason why uTorrent’s become so popular on Windows OS platforms.

So what’s new in Transmission 2.0?

From the release log:

“Local Peer Discovery” for finding peers on the local network
Optimize download requests for the bandwidth available
Smarter heuristics when deciding the order to connect to peers
Faster verification of local data
Faster startup
Support more blocklist file formats
Use IEC standard units (KiB, MiB, GiB) instead of (KB, MB, GB)
Better handling of 404 tracker errors

Stay tuned.

[email protected]

ALSO READ: Top 5 BitTorrent clients for MAC

Jared Moya
I've been interested in P2P since the early, high-flying days of Napster and KaZaA. I believe that analog copyright laws are ill-suited to the digital age, and that art and culture shouldn't be subject to the whims of international entertainment industry conglomerates. Twitter | Google Plus

I use it on Linux, it's the default on Ubuntu, and it appears to be the most used Linux torrent program. I see Ktorrent as well as Libtorrent, but more Transmission it seems. It's good, but with the large display format for each torrent you have loaded, it seems chunkier, where uTorrent fits a lot of info a small space as single lines, resembling a tabbed spreadsheet in a way. With Transmission I seem to have to scroll a lot to find a certain torrent in the list, and read a lot, and without the columns that uTorrent has, it's harder. Without a list, it can be harder to find out which torrent is seeding. To find more advanced info on your peers, you have to go to a separate window and tab, and it doesn't show country flags. I'm not as thrilled that Transmission's speed display shows 0 and at the next instant it's 60k or whatever, and then back to 0 again. It will also at times show impossibly fast upload speeds for the connection, like if you know you're on a 50k connection it will show an instantaneous 200k or something. It doesn't happen all of the time, but many times and then I'm not getting a feeling for what the average speed really is. Perhaps the program should sample the connection speed over a longer period and do other things to show what the average 'momentum' of the torrent is. The good things about Transmission, and there's actually a lot of good, is it does seem light on the system, it has a turtle button to instantly limit your speed, no right clicking for a speed adjustment like that. I think it might ban peers with corrupt files faster than others, it seems to, but that's a guess. For a simple everyday torrent program like Ubuntu would want to have, Transmission is right on. Most importantly, it works, woof!