The very last beta version of Transmission (whatever its v. number was) had been working on a torrent since last night, and just before I updated to this new v. 1.50b4 the old version was downloading from 0 of 10 peers at 0 KB/s. Then I installed this beta, restarted it, and right away it found 14 more peers than were available 1 minute before! Now it's downloading from 3 of 24 peers at around 40 KB/s! I guess this update fixed something!

However, a few days ago I installed the new version of Vuze (4.1.0.0) to compare it with Transmission by setting them up identically then pitting them against each other on the same 4 torrents. I figured Vuze would be bloated and slow (as it was before when it was called Azureus), but I was pleasantly surprised that Vuze wiped the floor with Transmission on download speed. For all 4 torrents, Vuze consistently downloaded 2 to 8 times faster than Transmission! In only 23 hours Vuze had completely downloaded the same 3GB torrent that Transmission had been working on for 3 days -- in fact, Transmission is STILL working on that one 10 hours after Vuze lapped it!!

However, since this new Transmission beta seems to be downloading substantially faster than the previous one, I will again compare it to Vuze. I'd be thrilled if Transmission could keep up with Vuze because I don't need 80% of the whistles and bells that Vuze has. I prefer a nice light app that doesn't use too many system resources, doesn't take up much screen real estate, and doesn't try to sell me stuff like the Vuze HD Network does.