I’m curious to know if anybody else finds their computer behaving sluggishly or erratically when downloading torrents.
For the record: I use transmission on a 2020 imac and have tried other clients to little avial. A virus and/or activity check doesn’t reveal anything untoward going on in the background.
I’m not sure what’s going on, but torrenting is either resource intensive (possibly RAM) or writing to the harddrive results in poor performance overall. Or maybe its something else (like my vpn draining resources)? Either way, when I torrent I might as well walk away from my computer because that’s all it seems it wants to do, and even then its performance remains erratic.
Try resetting the Transmission settings to default, turning off your VPN, and downloading a Linux ISO. If the problem stays, it’s possibly a hardware issue. If the problem goes away, turn the VPN on and try again. If the problem returns, the VPN is the issue.
I know you said you’ve tried other clients, but try them with the VPN disabled too, in case Transmission is the problem.
Good luck 👍