The transient behavior of the complex-LMS adaptive filter is studied when the adaptive filter is operating on a fixed or sweeping complex frequency sine-wave signal. The first-order difference equation is derived for the mean weights and its closed form solution is obtained. The transient response is represented as a function of the eigenvectors and eigenvalues of input correlation matrix. The mean-square error of the algorithm is evaluated as well. An optimal convergence parameter and filter length can be determined for sweeping frequency sine-wave signals as a function of frequency change rate and signal and noise powers.