The open source BitTorrent Transmission 4.0 client has landed after more than a year of development. With over a thousand commits, the new release focuses on no less than four areas: resource efficiency, better community, code modernization, and new features.
In terms of more efficient use of resources, the Transmission 4.0 code has been simplified to fix poor performance code and memory usage, with the developers claiming 50 percent fewer CPU cycles are now used and 70 percent fewer memory allocations based on stress test benchmarking. Also, payloads are smaller and bandwidth usage is reduced.
The modernization of the code base was achieved by porting it from C to C++, eliminating thousands of lines of custom code (the equivalent of 18 percent of the entire program) in favor of making use of the variety of standard C++ tools. Elsewhere, the Transmission web client has been rewritten in modern JavaScript and can now be used in mobile web browsers.
New features include support for downloading the latest BitTorrent v2 and hybrid torrents, with support for creating these torrents promised for a later version. Users also get the ability to set 'default' trackers to advertise all public torrents.
Newly added seeds now check parts on demand to ensure faster startup, and users get the ability to not only specify part sizes, but also bypass potential identifiers like User-Agents from torrents.
Finally, 'better community' improvements refer to better project responsiveness to code submissions and bug reports, which should hopefully speed up future development. Additionally, a new group of volunteer contributors became involved in the project, with more than 350 new community commits making code changes since the release of version 3.0.
Transmission 4.0 is now available as a free open source download for Windows (both 64 bit and 32 bit), MacOS and linux.
