Transmission not downloading

October 24, 2006 11:02 AM

Why won't Transmission work any more?

Transmission (the bitorrent client, not the one in my car) is not downloading these past few days. Any of the torrents say things like "downloading from 0 of 12 users" but then the rate is like 0.1 or thereabout and I'm not actually getting any files.

The speed of my cable seems to be about 900k although it does fluctuate. I've looked through all the forums, google, etc. and I can't find a fix.

Any thoughts?

posted by miles1972 to Computers & Internet (12 answers total)

Transmission is recognized as a seriously buggy bittorrent client; their forum has many examples (killed or not).
posted by lowlife at 11:12 AM on October 24, 2006

simple answer: many trackers have banned Transmission because of its bugs - I guess you're trying to access one of them.
posted by lowlife at 11:13 AM on October 24, 2006

Thanks lowlife. That makes sense - Now I wonder why I couldn't find that in the forums.

Any recommendations for a similar client? I found Transmissions so easy to use and didn't seem to clog things up...
posted by miles1972 at 11:18 AM on October 24, 2006

Utorrent is lightweight and stable.
posted by subtle-t at 11:24 AM on October 24, 2006

I actually had this same problem. Turns out my ISP started blocking torrent traffic. I had to switch to Azureus so that I could encrypt my traffic.
posted by drleary at 11:27 AM on October 24, 2006

second utorrent. a lot nicer to my dinosaur processor than azureus.
posted by muddgirl at 11:31 AM on October 24, 2006

Reboot your computer. If that doesn't fix it reboot your unplug your cable modem and reboot your computer. Are you having any issues with web sites, FTP or anything else? Have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling Transmission? If it still doesn't work after that I would try a different BT client. If it still doesn't work a new BT client perhaps your ISP is doing something to block it. I don't know enough about the BT protocol to know if it is blockable.
posted by dgeiser13 at 11:47 AM on October 24, 2006

for those that have suggested utorrent, Transmission is a mac-based torrent client, so I doubt miles1972 will be using that unless dual booting or using Parallels

There is a version of Azureus available for OS X - it's a Java-based client. However, it'll probably chew up a lot of resources on your machine (you don't say what kind of mac you have).

You may want to try BitRocket or Xtorrent.
posted by lowlife at 12:21 PM on October 24, 2006

Thank everyone. I'll give those clients a shot and see if it makes a difference...and yes, I'm on a mac. It's a G4 PowerBook.
posted by miles1972 at 1:26 PM on October 24, 2006

tomato rocks, its the only client i use. azeureus had the bad side effect of hanging my machine! probably it just exposed bugs in the Java VM though.
posted by joeblough at 3:12 PM on October 24, 2006

ok. Tried Tomato. Same problem. Nothing coming in. So could this ISP be blocking torrents? Is there a work around for that? (preferably using Tomato) but anything?
posted by miles1972 at 3:46 PM on October 24, 2006

If the ISP is blocking torrents, your best bet is to use Azureus and turn on the encryption features --- it stops the ISP detecting and shaping bittorrent traffic.

But before you bother with that, make sure your ports are set up properly.
posted by robcorr at 2:07 AM on October 25, 2006