Poor torrent speeds with Transmission. What gives?

Using Transmission to download a torrent, I've noticed that download speeds are consistently hovering around 15% of what my connection is capable of downloading -- which is to say, it's still a triple-digit kb/s, but quite a bit slower than it should be.

In Transmission, my port setting tells me that the chosen port is wide open, which leads me to think that neither Snow Leopard's firewall nor my Time Capsule / router is getting in the way, even without me checking specific settings. The download speed in Transmission is set to unlimited, and even if I set upload speed to 60% of what your usual residential cable internet line can handle, there doesn't seem to be an improvement.

The online Glasnost test tells me that there is no ISP throttling being done.

The torrents can have anywhere from seven seeds to dozens, to hundreds, and into the thousands, and can be left to run for minutes to a couple of hours. It doesn't matter. I've also seen torrents connected to north of 300 seeders without an improvement in speed.

What gives?

 

Have you tried another client like utorrent? I gave up on Transmission since they took for ever to fix the crashing bug after snowleopard update. Also do you know how torrents even work? If a torrent has 1000 seeders but 3000 leechers it won't be as fast as if it had 3000 seeders and 1000 leechers.

 

Why yes, yes, I do. What did I say that suggested I didn't? Anywhere from 300+ connected peers to seeds in the thousands, like I said, and still the same results. Hell, still the same results with 40 seeds sometimes.

 

Here is what gives:

1. I have sometimes had issues with transmission. go for utorrent instead.

2. the download speed of a particular torrent is not dictated by the download speed capacity of your internet line. the way torrents work, other individuals upload data to you, and so they are almost always the limitation. of course, you will never see download speeds break your download speed capacity, but having a faster connection does not necessarily mean faster torrenting for a particular torrent. so a really slow line could impede you, but an insanely fast line usually won't be better than a moderate one, for common torrents.

2a. you could beat that system and take advantage of your faster internet by downloading multiple torrents in parallel. since the uploaders are the limiting factor, you may be able to increase your *TOTAL* download rate by adding more torrents, without any significant change to an individual torrent.

3. i think transmission is set up properly, based on what you said, but i think you should switch to utorrent anyway

4. more seeds usually means more peers. so having more seeds does not necessarily mean faster downloads. if there are 20 seeds and 20 peers, you may find that you get about the same rate as with a 2000 seed 2000 peer torrent. also, while sometimes it can take a few minutes to connect to the other torrent users, letting the thing run for longer is not going to cause an improvement in your download *rate*, compared to letting it run for a few minutes. you may have been led to believe this by a particular case or two, but causation != correlation.

that is what gives with torrents. good luck.

 

I was just making sure, because you said you had lots of seeders, maybe you thought that having lots of seeders would make it fast, witch is not always the case.

 

i've always used utorrent and havent noticed any decrease in speed. I would also suggest you to go with it.

 

i think part of the issue is that the OP is just noticing that a torrent's download speed isn't as necessarily as fast as his internet connection.

 

Well, I didn't expect it to be. What I just found odd was that even though I've been using torrents as needed for quite a long time, this is the first time where I've had any sort of problems and noticed what seems like a limit to the download speed no matter what the situation was with seeds to connected peers. Thought it was my ISP until I checked on Glasnost.

Anyway, will try uTorrent. Was my client of choice when I was still using Vista/7.

 

No i have noticed this problem with torrents in general on OS X, its also a common problem if you google it. For some reason torrents on OS X seem to be slower in reaching their maximum speeds then on their windows counterparts for some strange reason. Ive actually tested it out side by side and a Movie file that was 1.3gigs took me roughly 15 minutes on the mac side whereas on the windows side it took me about 10 minutes. Also doing a speed test on a well seeded file On the windows side I was able to get 3MBs but on Mac it seemed to stay fixed at 1.3MBs.

 

Under the Preferences, goto Peers tab and uncheck PEX and DHT. Hope that helps because that's what worked for me.

 

Unchecking PEX and DHT now might work, but soon you will need them.

 

Just tried that -- doesn't appear to be making any difference either way. My understanding was that peer exchange / hash tables are beneficial, but hey, was worth a shot.

This weird "cap" I'm seeing in Transmission isn't happening in uTorrent. What in the world..?

 

They are, more torrent sites are moving to them and going away from trackers.

 

you could make the wild inference that there is a problem with transmission that doesn't exist with utorrent.

i also have had a variety of issues with transmission, which is why i recommended utorrent- the result is not very surprising to me.

as far as OS X having torrent issues, i find that a stretch. torrent clients are all 3rd party and are pretty distant from the OS.

 

I use Vuze, and I get pretty decent speeds. That was after a little tweaking, though.

 

Heh, I think you got a little of your sarcasm on me. Was just looking for a reason before resigning myself to that, is all.

 

it could be a setting in transmission that needs to be changed, but i have had other problems with transmission that merit switching to utorrent anyway, so if utorrent works out of the box, i vote that solution 100%.

not worth investigating if solved by utorrent.

primarily: with transmission, i have had corrupted downloads that don't fix themselves upon file verification. that instantly made me switch.

 

I use utorrent and I've saturated my download connection at over 16Mbit/s I got 2.1MB/s on a single torrent for 5minutes! it was fantastic! sound good? maybe give utorrent a try, free + fast = win.