For the longest time I used only Transmission and I had assumed that my very slow and yo-yoing download speeds were the fault of my ISP. I thought this was as good as it got with BitTorrent. Boy was I ever wrong.

Approx. a month ago I tried out the brand new Mac port of µTorrent. Even being very beta quality software it is on average 10x faster than Transmission at getting torrents downloaded. I switched back and forth for several weeks between the two clients using the exact same torrents - it's no fluke. I even tried the old official BitTorrent client and the ageing Tomato Torrent - both were MUCH faster than Transmission and on par with µTorrent.

Now if it was just speed I might even stick with Transmission while µTorrent's bugs are ironed out. Transmission's UI and feature set are so much better, and Tomato Torrent - which works well - cannot selectively download part of a multi-file torrent. That feature is also buggy in µTorrent.

But sadly Transmission began a couple months ago to allocate all it's upload bandwidth to just one torrent 95% of the time, with predictable negative performance results for the neglected torrents. This has made Transmission almost impossible to use, and the refusal by the developers to even continue to discuss the issue does not inspire confidence in an eventual resolution.

As a result my recommendation has to be to avoid Transmission for the foreseeable future - and that's a damn shame :-(