Transmission 4.0 promises more efficient performance, support for BitTorrent v2 and hybrid torrents

Open-source BitTorrent client Transmission 4.0 has landed after over a year in development. Sporting over one thousands commits, the new release focuses on no fewer than four areas: resource efficiency, better community, code modernization and new features.

In terms of more efficient use of resources, Transmission 4.0’s code has been streamlined to fix poorly performing code and memory usage, with developers claiming 50 percent fewer CPU cycles and 70 percent fewer memory allocations are now used based on stress test benchmarking. In addition, payloads are smaller and bandwidth usage reduced.

The modernization of the code base has been achieved by porting it from C to C++, removing thousands of lines of customized code -- the equivalent of 18 percent of the entire program -- in favor of making use of C++’s array of standard tools. Elsewhere, Transmission’s web client has been rewritten in modern JavaScript, and can now be used on 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 release. Users also gain the ability to set 'default' trackers for announcing all public torrents.

Newly added seeds now verify pieces on demand to ensure faster starts, and users gain the ability to not just specify piece sizes but also omit potential identifiers such as User-Agent from torrents.

Finally, 'better community' improvements refer to the project’s better responsiveness to code submissions and bug reports, which should hopefully speed up future development. In addition, a new group of volunteer contributors have got involved with the project, with over 350 new community commits making up code changes since version 3.0’s release.

Transmission 4.0 is available now as a free, open-source download for Windows (both 64-bit and 32-bit), macOS and Linux.