Ubuntu 10.10 Performance issues with transmission or ktorrent indicator applet

[Jon Grant]

Hello

I am trying to figure out why my fresh Ubuntu 10.10 install on Acer 
3820T laptop is having performance and stability problems with 
bittorrent clients.

(Other laptop with older Ubuntu on same Wifi is fine.)


I am using Gnome desktop, with pae kernel:

Linux note 2.6.35-25-generic-pae #44-Ubuntu SMP Fri Jan 21 19:01:46 UTC 
2011 i686 GNU/Linux


The problem
===========

Transmission bit torrent client window stops responding.
Load visible in "top" is 100%. I guess it only has a single thread.

I switched to ktorrent. Same problem, but it used 200% (both cores!)


   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
  2273 jon       20   0  258m  51m  25m S  200  1.4  43:03.63 ktorrent


What I wonder is if this is related to indicator-applet. Has it some how 
lost the app that it minimises in the bar top right of screen?

As the problem seems not related as two different applications have same 
problem. Firefox and OpenOffice running well though.


I did have a problem that "nautils" got stuck trying to show the 
"Downloads" folder. Only seen that once. I needed to reboot to sort it.

No error messages in /var/log/messages giving me any clues where to look 
next.

I've got 4GB ram, but no swap space configured. that should be ok though 
right?


Any advice greatly appreciated.
Cheers, Jon