Raspberry / Raspbian: transmission high memory usage

Suddenly, the Transmission web interface does not respond: the first warning sign of a halted service. Issuing the trusty dmesg command in a terminal quickly shows that for some reason the transmission-daemon was axed by the raspbian kernel for being RAM-hungry (it is also discussed over here). As it turns out, the more recent versions of the transmission-daemon do not eat up all the precious memory – trouble is, we wouldn’t want to compile the whole thing from source code. What should we do?

Idea: add the ‘testing’ repo to our Raspbian and install transmission-daemon from there

To do this, we need to create a couple of files and issue some commands. Let’s start:

1. create two files as follows:
   • nano /etc/apt/preferences.d/jessie.pref and enter the following content:
     

     Package: *
     Pin: release n=jessie
     Pin-Priority: 900

   • nano /etc/apt/preferences.d/stretch.pref and enter the following content:
     

     Package: *
     Pin: release n=stretch
     Pin-Priority: 750

2. create another two files as follows:
   • nano /etc/apt/sources.list.d/jessie.list and enter the following content:
     

     deb http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org/raspbian/ jessie main contrib non-free rpi

   • nano /etc/apt/sources.list.d/stretch.list and enter the following content:
     

     deb http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org/raspbian/ testing main contrib non-free rpi

3. time to update the package index:
   sudo apt-get update
4. finally, update transmission-daemon and dependencies from the testing repo:
   sudo apt-get install transmission-daemon -t testing