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Running a torrent can have a pretty significant draw on bandwidth, but it shouldn't affect much else.
If you're doing things locally it should be almost unnoticeable. If you're trying to surf the net or stream video then you will absolutely see a performance hit.
If that is what you're doing, you can set bandwidth limits on most clients (I have no experience with Transmission) to make the experience better
Check your activity monitor. It is possible that the bottleneck is lack of network resources or a busy drive.
This is the best idea. My guess is the hard drive is also getting overloaded by Windows helper tasks in the background.
Probably not since OP is on a Mac.
My thought is more that there might be a bottleneck for the drive. In Windows a hard drive at 100% utilization slows down the system. I don't know what kind of drive op has, but poor perform would be displayed in the performance monitor.
Also, if they are playing games and the network is saturated, they would experience network performance issues.
This depends a lot on the specifics of your torrents, your client, your OS, and your hardware configuration.
In the past I have suffered almost complete system lockups for extended periods because a combination of large torrents, qBittorrent, Windows, and low-speed HDDs caused huge IO locks. I could see in Task Manager that my HDDs were writing at full speed (still higher than my download speed, of course). Even when I had disabled the option to preallocate files, and even if I enabled the option to download sequentially, this still occurred. If you google around you can find similar reports tracing this behavior down to a limitation in libtorrent.
I have never encountered this issue on other OSes, and I'm not sure if this has been fixed; last time I encountered this was probably a couple years ago, and I haven't used Windows much since then.
I used to run hundreds of torrents on early 2000s hardware and it was fine. Not sure what the problem is, but it's not the bittorrent protocol.
I did notice some sluggishness when I used to torrent on my previous computer which had an HDD. I have sinced moved all torrenting to my NAS because it's always on, so I don't need to worry about turning on the torrent client (it's just always on)
I was having real issues for ages with torrent activity causing issues on my home network, and tried all the usual things - e.g. Limiting bandwidth use, limiting number of connection, disabling DHT and the like - but for me, the culprit turned out to be the VPN, and specifically the use of a traditional openvpn based connection. Switching to Wireguard made a transformative difference. No issues since.
Question: does your iMac have a hard drive or an SSD? My mom still uses our old iMac, and whenever the hard drive is being used extensively (while downloading something, for example), the whole computer will be really sluggish.
I’m pretty sure all of the 2020 iMacs are SSD-only, so I doubt that’s what’s causing your bottleneck.