Transmission, the most used non-commercial BitTorrent client, has reached a new milestone with the release of version 2.0. The community driven application, installed on millions of computers worldwide, is now faster and smarter than ever before. We get the lowdown from Transmission developer Charles Kerr.

Transmission saw its first public release nearly five years ago. Since then the free, multi-platform application has gathered a steady user-base of millions of users.

Transmission became the default BitTorrent client on various Linux distributions including Ubuntu, and it is also one of the most-used Mac BitTorrent clients.

This week Transmission’s development reached an important milestone as the stable version of Transmission 2.0 was released. Transmission, often praised by its users for being full-featured but lightweight, has geared up for the increasing demands of BitTorrent users today.

TorrentFreak spoke with Transmission developer Charles Kerr who walked us through some of the most notable improvements in the latest Transmission release.

“Transmission 2.0’s code is faster and smarter,” Charles Kerr said. “We’ve profiled the code for CPU bottlenecks and removed them. Startup, peer management, blocklists, and verifying local data are all faster. Transmission 2.0 is also smarter about detecting and handling network lag.”

“For 24/7 remote seedboxes, headless systems, and embedded systems, we’ve made Transmission-daemon easier to build, added hooks for scripting, and shrunk the memory footprint. Transmission-daemon has one of the smallest footprints — if not the smallest — of any BitTorrent client.”

Transmission takes pride in being volunteer-based and non-commercial, unlike bigger clients such as uTorrent, Vuze, and BitComet. Charles told TorrentFreak that this also comes with a downside, because future development relies on its community of volunteers.

“It means development happens only when volunteers are available,” he said. “For example, if any of your readers are Windows or ExtJS programmers who want to work on the Windows or Web clients, the Transmission team would like to hear from them.”

Indeed, you’re reading it right, a native Windows application is a serious option if there are skilled volunteers available. For now, however, Transmission’s expansion possibilities are limited to the other platforms while it has to settle for the title of the most-used BitTorrent client without a Windows version.