Transmission and swap issues?

[Amuso]

My EPoX EP-5EPA+ Mac is still running strong and in use about every day. It is used to get film clips of the net and to view them on our TV using either FrontRow (with Perian) or VideoLAN. Thus it runs Transmission now. I used to have Azureus (version 2.5) do the job, but it usually used up quite a bit of CPU since it is Java-based. And I wanted to use something a bit more lightweight to grab those torrents.

 

In combination with the TVShows application the system is pretty much automated. I used some time to tune Transmission to my liking, and now I am very pleased with it. I do like it better than Azureus and it is very easy to use.

 

However, nothing is quite perfect so I do have some issues with my setup. If I have more than 5-6 torrents active the machine can very often "hang" with the colored wheel mouse icon thingy. I believe it is a memory swap issue where the machine runs out of memory and starts to page bits and pieces back and forth between the harddrive and RAM. The machine just has 1GB so it is very plausible. I have seen similar things on an iMac 20" running other applications.

 

I used to have similar issues with the EPoX-machine running another Leopard release when it had more memory as well. Just see my other blog entries for full details. It would then finally stop working with USB drives and many other small issues. However, USB seems to work just fine still with the current Leo4All install I am running. When I get the time I will try and install some more memory to see if it helps with the swap-problems. It could also be the drive going bad.

 

Another application I want to try out is X-Plane 9 on this hardware. My MacBook doesnt have the best graphics card in the world to run this flight simulator, but maybe it will run better on the Hackintosh even though it is just a Celeron D...