Does torrenting slow down your computer?

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.