Transmission is a free, open-source BitTorrent client software, well-known to Linux and macOS users. It is designed to download and upload files over the internet via the BitTorrent protocol, a popular peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing method.
With Transmission, users can download large files by dividing them into small pieces and downloading them from multiple sources. This allows for faster download speeds and helps distribute the download load across numerous users, making the overall process more efficient.
In addition to downloading and uploading files, Transmission also offers a range of features, including a web interface, support for encrypted connections, and the ability to limit upload and download speeds. These characteristics, combined with its lightweight and easy-to-use interface, make it one of the best BitTorrent clients.
After more than a year and a half of development since the previous v3.0 release, Transmission 4.0 is finally here, so let’s look at what’s new.
Transmission 4.0 BitTorrent Client Highlights
First of all, Transmission 4.0 is a major release resulting in more than a year of work by the developers. The app has received over a thousand commits on GitHub during that time.
The improved app’s resource efficiency is impressive. The code has been profiled and optimized to address inefficient memory usage. According to the developers, a stress test with 25,000 torrents consumes 50% fewer CPU cycles and 70% fewer memory allocations than Transmission 3.0.
Moreover, the entire Transmission’s codebase has been rewritten from C to C++. At the same time, the developers removed thousands of lines of code, resulting in an 18% reduction in the core’s code.
The GTK client has been ported to gtkmm, the GTK library’s official C++ interface, while the Transmission’s web client has been rewritten in modern JavaScript and no longer relies on jQuery.
On top of that, the Transmission 4.0 web client now supports mobile use, which is an excellent feature. In addition, users can specify the piece size when creating new torrents.
But wait, the news doesn’t end there. Transmission 4.0 has received support for using BitTorrent protocol v2 torrents, an improved version of the early BitTorrent standards that use SHA-256 hashing instead SHA-1 hash. Additionally, the app also supports hybrid torrents.
You can refer to the release notes for more about all novelties in Transmission BitTorrent client 4.0 or visit the project’s website.
Finally, the primary question users are asking is when they will be able to try out all of the new features coming with Transmission 4.0. As always, users of rolling release Linux distributions, such as Arch Linux, Void, openSUSE Tumbleweed, etc., are expected to get the latest package versions in their repositories first, probably in the next few weeks.
