The 5 Most Popular BitTorrent Trackers
Written by Ernesto on September 24, 2007Most BitTorrent sites don’t run their own tracker, and the ones that do often go unnoticed and don’t always get the respect they deserve. It might not be a surprise that The Pirate Bay is by far the most popular, but you might be surprised to find out which trackers complete the top 5.
The sites are ranked based on the total number of seeders and leechers on the tracker.
1. thepiratebay.org
peers: 5.164.500
torrents: 636.734
2. demonoid.com
peers: 3.138.042 (estimated)
torrents: *no info*
3. denis.stalker.h3q.com
peers: 1.353.421
torrents: 195.586
4. sumotracker.org
peers: 1.256.358
torrents: 130.693
5. torrentbox.com
peers: 1.144.100
torrents: 40.818
The Pirate Bay and Demonoid take up the first two spots, and it has been like that for over a year. The three remaining sites in the list are perhaps not that well known to the general public, even though most of us use their trackers nearly every day.
One of the least familiar sites from this list is probably SUMOtracker. It’s pretty impressive that they made it into the top 5, especially as the tracker has only been running for a few months. We took this opportunity to ask the administrator of SUMOtracker and SUMOtorrent some questions to find out what drives someone to keep a project like this running.
TorrentFreak: Most BitTorrent sites don’t have their own tracker nowadays. Why did you choose to start an indexing site and a BitTorrent tracker?
Sumo: The SUMOtorrent team members have been involved into the BitTorrent community since the very beginning, and we noticed that there was really few public BitTorrent trackers nowadays, affiliated to an indexer or not. After Mongo56 and BitTorrent-Support closed, there was only Pirate Bay’s tracker remaining out there. Our team initially started the SUMOtorrent project to fill this gap and developed an open source BitTorrent tracker: SUMOtracker. While it was still in development, we decided to launch SUMOtracker with a PHP tracker, which then evolved into a C++ tracker to support today more than 1.2 million peers.
TorrentFreak: What kind of hardware keeps SUMOtracker and SUMOtorrent in the air?
SUMO: SUMOtorrent and SUMOtracker are running on 5 servers at the moment:
- SUMOtracker is running onto a dual-core 3.2 Ghz with 2GB of RAM, 10 mbits/s dedicated line
- SUMOtorrent is running on 4 servers:
We will scale the architecture for both sites everytime is required, and our next scheduled upgrades include a second server for SUMOtracker and front-ends and dedicated servers for the new services, such as torrent mail alerts
TorrentFreak: SUMOtracker tracks over a million peers already. How did you manage to grow this fast?
SUMO: We were very surprised to see that our tracker reached such a high number of peers this fast! In part this is because of our good relationships with other BitTorrent websites. The tracker started growing very fast after some very popular sites, Mininova for example, recommended us as a reliable public tracker. Then, about 2 months ago, we decided to go even further by adding SUMOTracker as a backup tracker (i.e. by adding it to the announce-list of torrents) for all public .torrent files, so when the original tracker is out of service, users could still use the torrents.
TorrentFreak: Do you think you can ever outgrow the untouchable Pirate Bay? Or do you have a different agenda?
SUMO: I don’t think so, for a very simple reason: SUMOtracker is not a site that intends to compete with other BitTorrent trackers. The site and the tracker are just our contribution to the community! Hence, our purpose is absolutely not to make SUMOtracker outgrow other trackers, but to work with other webmasters to make the BitTorrent network stronger. A concrete example of our way of thinking: SUMOTorrent not only adds SUMOTracker, but also other public trackers like Pirate Bay to the announce-list. So any torrent with SUMOTracker as backup also has Pirate Bay as a backup tracker.
We also shared the source code for this feature to other BitTorrent sites. Monova.org or FullDls.com for example, are using a similar method! And if there are new public BitTorrent site starting, we will also support them and integrate them!
TorrentFreak: Does SUMOTorrent have any features that other BitTorrent sites don’t have?
SUMO: We freshly launched a new service that I believe to be unique as of today: torrents mail alerts. Without any registration, users can simply put their email address in a box and they will receive by email an alert by email when new torrents are available for their search keyword. We believe it will be useful to users, more than RSS2 or search RSS as not everybody has a RSS client, while everybody has an email address!
TorrentFreak: Can you reveal something about new features and or improvements you are working on at the moment?
SUMO: Yes sure! I think the next big evolution of SUMOtorrent will be the multilingual version. Some other cool features we are working are related to the user experience.
We are also working on core features: even stronger protections to fight against spam and fake torrents, improving the quality of results, the speed of the site…
TorrentFreak: Sounds great, anything to add?
SUMO: Since we started, SUMOtorrent has always been dedicated to the community. We partnered with FileSoup.co.uk and we are working closely with several webmasters, which are “good friends”: Mininova, Fenopy, FullDls, myBittorrent, Bitoogle, Yotoshi, Monova, … We are part of that group of sites that really focus on the user, and we will continue with our current means to provide the best service to users!
TorrentFreak: Good luck with the tracker and the site, we could use more initiatives like this.
Previously: Porn Industry Infighting As Pirate Bay Takes On Big Media
Next: IsoHunt Takes Down BitTorrent Trackers in the US
75 Responses
Interesting that you can run a tracker with a hundred thousand peers on one server, even though it is fairly high end, and with 10Mbit/s bandwidth.
I would have thought that it would be more; Good thing though =)
Or wait, not a hundred thousand; A million peers. It was a hundred thousand torrents. Even better :)
Yeah, it’s impressive stuff. Massive respect to those who invest not only their money but also large amounts of time in providing back ends for the bit torrent community!
I’ve ofter thought about starting a public tracker but I only know some of what is involved. Any tracker admin howtos/forums/email lists out there? And since I’m in the US, personal protection is an issue too. I think this would be a good article Ernesto.
Well done Sumo guys.
[quote comment="172603"]I’ve ofter thought about starting a public tracker but I only know some of what is involved. Any tracker admin howtos/forums/email lists out there? And since I’m in the US, personal protection is an issue too. I think this would be a good article Ernesto.
Well done Sumo guys.[/quote]
That’s not really my field of expertise, but I could ask some of the tracker admins for their advise. I’m sure that will result in a useful article ;)
[quote]Yeah, it’s impressive stuff. Massive respect to those who invest not only their money but also large amounts of time in providing back ends for the bit torrent community![/quote]
I second that; The tracker admins are *ESSENTIAL* to the community.
We appreciate it =)
[quote]That’s not really my field of expertise, but I could ask some of the tracker admins for their advise. I’m sure that will result in a useful article[/quote]
That would be an interesting idea, you should do it :)
kudos to sumo, filesoup is rock
well needed verification dudes
reach for it, we follow
A lot of these numbers are inflated. All of the mediadefender “fake” torrents that are posted use the denis.stalker tracker. Which in turn makes it look like a hell of a lot more people are on them.
[quote comment="172540"]Interesting that you can run a tracker with a hundred thousand peers on one server, even though it is fairly high end, and with 10Mbit/s bandwidth.
I would have thought that it would be more; Good thing though =)[/quote]
The bittorrent tracker protocol doesn’t use that much bandwidth. The tracker protocol as such is rather simple, and serving an “announce request” is just a matter of grabbing some number of peer records from some kind of a data structure, hopefully with some algorithm that produces a different subset of a large swarm each time.
Usually when people set up one of those godawful PHP + MySQL trackers, the man slowdown comes from database contention (i.e. table-level locking in MyISAM and “SELECT * FROM peers WHERE torrent_id = ? ORDER BY RANDOM() LIMIT 50″). I’d say that a clever programmer could write a multithreaded tracker daemon that kept its data in main memory and serve an order of magnitude more clients than anything that relied on a SQL database for each and every “announce” request.
Which, I suppose, is what these guys are doing. A million peers, each poking announce and/or scrape every 300 seconds comes down to an average of ~3333 requests every second… No SQL server is going to produce 3k result sets of even trivial queries in a second.
Too bad about #5 “we have disabled access from users in the US to our trackers. This goes for ALL trackers (torrentbox, podtropolis) we run.”
As reported in your next story.
http://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-takes-down-isohunt-podtropolis-torrentbox-070925/
Somehow, I doubt the accuracy of this information. How was this data even collected?
I actually never use The Pirate Bay. Anything I download is super-indexed on BTMon, and most of it comes from Demonoid. Everyone I know uses Demonoid alone. Seems like it would be first rank.
Hi all,
Thanks for all your messages, we will continue working hard for the community!!!
The numbers givens for SUMOTracker are exact, you can check our stats at anytime here:
http://sumotracker.org/stats
[quote comment="172684"]A lot of these numbers are inflated. All of the mediadefender “fake” torrents that are posted use the denis.stalker tracker. Which in turn makes it look like a hell of a lot more people are on them.[/quote]
Well, open trackers have fakes on them, duh. They are used by many Bittorrent sites, legitimate or not.
But obviously, some of the people working at MediaDefender have an interest in destroying trust in the community. This is easily done by blaming random people of being “anti-p2p”. Spreading mistrust is a powerful weapon against underground structures, especially when it goes against important sites, like, say, the third-largest tracker in the world.
@4:
You might get some good/usefull information from the guys running the denis.stalker.h3q.com tracker. Good thing is, it’s an open tracker, you just announce to it, then it starts tracking the provided hash. So they don’t even know what stuff is tracked, as only the hash is available to them. Might be the only way they can run a tracker in Germany nowadays without getting mutch trouble.
And regarding the alleged high fake numbers on this tracker. As the torrent file is not provided by them, they can’t realy held accountable for that. If you don’t get a fake torrent from somewhere, you wont be affected after all. They don’t run a Indexing site providing those fake torrents.
And to Bluetack: Get over it and unban them. Your claims are just ridiculous.
denis.stalker.h3q.com is the greatest thing to happen to bit torrent imo.
denis-stalker.h3q.com has been banned by PeerGuardian -at least twice- maybe they know something you don’t?
SUMOtorrent needs a web designer with taste.
Pirate Bay is bland and sparce on torrent detail… they could take lessons from Demonoid, which has the best content and presentation thereof…
…and someone needs to clear up what tv.miivi.org is before the community has a freak-attack.
I always get “hostname not found” errors with denis.stalker.h3q.com
???
@16:
Maybe bluetack knows shit.
@17:
We had some movings in our DNS setup yesterday and some firewall rearrangement today, if you keep having this problem just drop us a note at abuse (at) denis.stalker.h3q.com or in our blog.
It looks fine from our side.
@18
PeerGuardian reports h3q torrents as Speedbone|Anti-p2p (217.13.206.147).
@19:
And? Bluetack, the guys providing the blacklist for PeerGuardian, changed that from CCC to speedbone a few days ago because we are not the CCC.
Speedbone is the hoster our server is located and the Anti-p2p flag nonsense.
But you can read our view at http://opentracker.blog.h3q.com/?p=29
@20
YOUR view is irrelivant… and until you cease to appear on any of the 21 lists that I’m blocking, it will remain so.
[quote]YOUR view is irrelivant… and until you cease to appear on any of the 21 lists that I’m blocking, it will remain so.[/quote]
All blocklists are 100% perfect? Good to know.
“Bullet-proof” vests are 100% perfect, but cops still wear them.
(”…areN’T…”)
[quote]“Bullet-proof” vests aren’t 100% perfect, but cops still wear them.[/quote]
What if they did more harm then good? Like blocking legitimate seeds and peers, or blocking legitimate trackers?
I’m not a fan of police anyway ;P
I too, use to wonder if the ‘lists’ were all they are claimed to be… all I can tell you is that Comcast stopped sending me ‘copyright infrigement notices’ after I installed PeerGuardian.
[quote]I too, use to wonder if the ‘lists’ were all they are claimed to be… all I can tell you is that Comcast stopped sending me ‘copyright infrigement notices’ after I installed PeerGuardian.[/quote]
I got in a car crash once. Then I painted my car black; I havn’t crashed once since!
/Fake story, real point :P
Um, isn’t #3 fake? I remember a story on fake trackers not too long ago and that tracker was listed as fake…
Actually, never mind. I misread. My apologies to the admins of denis.
> What if (PeerGuardian) did more harm then good? Like blocking
> legitimate seeds and peers, or blocking legitimate trackers?
The percentage of “good” peers that IP filters might block is minuscule. In the case of (allegedly) “good” trackers, that’s what DHT and PEX are for.
2 words ..”Private Trackers” :)
I notice the lack of some trackers in this list.
What about oink, standing strong at
Torrents :201,432
Peers 1,968,302
SUMO i would like you to be in partner with torrentrealm.com
I am thinking of turning it into a public tracker again using XBTT or turning it into a indexing site.
[quote]The percentage of “good” peers that IP filters might block is minuscule. In the case of (allegedly) “good” trackers, that’s what DHT and PEX are for.[/quote]
My Safepeer plugin from azureus (with bluetack list, same as peerguardian) blocks 62% of the internet. I am certain that 62% of the internet is not made up of anti-p2p organizations, so no, the number of valid peers blocked is not miniscule.
[quote]2 words ..”Private Trackers”[/quote]
13 words: “Torrents die all on their own without the MPAA having to do anything!”
[quote]My Safepeer plugin from azureus (with bluetack list, same as peerguardian) blocks 62% of the internet.[/quote]
I find that impossible to believe. 62% of the internet certainly isn’t blocked to me. And, it’s not like you can’t right-click the tray icon to disable a setting at any time.
If you give MySQL enough memory it will run just as fast as memory strings in c++, if not faster. Imagine writing stupid queries in plain c++ forget it!
But what happened to http://tracker.nxvr.org ?
Did somebody set up us the bomb?
[quote]I find that impossible to believe. 62% of the internet certainly isn’t blocked to me. [/quote]
http://img214.imageshack.us/img214/2281/gkrellshoot092707154631wo9.jpg
Heh, maybe I am misinterpreting it or something…
[quote]And, it’s not like you can’t right-click the tray icon to disable a setting at any time.[/quote]
You’re right, Safepeer doesn’t have that.
Sharing will never die. As long as we have a connection we will keep the fight until we win! We the people are growing stronger everyday. Your must come up with a plan and come out victorious!!!
I am user of demonoid,& it not fare why have they pick on them when there are so many other torrent sites out there. I have be try to seed my uploads a couple of days ago I didn’t know they were taken of line. It’ funny know because today I downloaded somethink,& the tracker was demonoid & it downloaded. Hope to see them up & running again soon. Best wishes demonoiders, PsPBuRnOuTReVeNcE.
I have to “allow” PeerGaurdian often as I am going on sites for my kids and information sites in general. I think that it is safe to say that a good percentage of sites are owned by commercial entities that link back to the big brother (so to speak).
Ok The Pirate Bay is at the top and has been for ages now. Personally I much preferred Torrentspy before it banned U.S. users and cut off all comments.
But I really would like to know, If so many people are using ThePirateBay, then why do I rarely find the Torrents Im searching for. Anything obscure I can hardly ever find on TPB, but I find it easily on Demonoid though I cant get it there, and on others Ill find it, but get swamped in SPAM popups. What is up with The Pirate Bay?
[quote][quote]I find that impossible to believe. 62% of the internet certainly isn’t blocked to me.[/quote]http://img214.imageshack.us/img214/2281/gkrellshoot092707154631wo9.jpg
Heh, maybe I am misinterpreting it or something…[/quote]
Blocking 62% of IP ranges doesn’t mean you’re blocking 62% of the desirable places on the internet. It’s entirely possible that upwards of 95% or more of the inbound pings you get in some torrents are from “bad” fake-mongers and MPAA address harvesters — do you want to connect to that traffic, or do you want to “block 95% of the internet” at that point?
can anyone send me an invitation code for demonoid?
Bullshit! Go to http://www.mediadefender.com/antipiracy.html and you will meet Denis Stalker.
And what’s about torrents.ru? It has 120000000 - 150000000 peers and 150000 torrents…
Super Fundo is the shit, if you guys don’t know now you do! these torrents are released by the greats, people that take the time to make shure that if they are releasing it onto you computer that it is real and not something that is going to creat a cramp in you freedom or your expensive computers!
http://denis.stalker.h3q.com:6969 is fake. Every time I have downloaded something that has that tracker in it the movie won’t play or the file won’t work.
wpnt mcpfayuo spvx iwlmejks euvfiz sjtg jmyue
@48:
Its not. If we would be fake, why would thepiratebay use our software? See http://opentracker.blog.h3q.com/?p=33
http://replicaguards.com/replica-handbags/replica-gucci-hobo-handbags.php
8.556.721 peers (3.606.575 seeders + 4.950.146 leechers) in 913.968 torrents on tracker.
3 months and 3.5 millions peers, 300k torrents increase.
Demonoid has been shut down.
RIP Demonoid
try
http://www.SceneLeech.Org
[quote comment="250001"]try
http://www.SceneLeech.Org/quote
require an invite to join.
:(
tracker tuga fixe e com boas velocidades e novidades todos os dias
http://www.spazhome.com
aprovetem esta aberto torrents fresquinhos
Visit http://www.maxneeds.hostsnake.com and lets make this tracker even bigger :)
[quote comment="191029"]Ok The Pirate Bay is at the top and has been for ages now. Personally I much preferred Torrentspy before it banned U.S. users and cut off all comments.
But I really would like to know, If so many people are using ThePirateBay, then why do I rarely find the Torrents Im searching for. Anything obscure I can hardly ever find on TPB, but I find it easily on Demonoid though I cant get it there, and on others Ill find it, but get swamped in SPAM popups. What is up with The Pirate Bay?[/quote]
I Agree…Although I Knew About The Existence Of [I Never Used] TPB For As Long As TS Existed.
On The Other Hand…TS Had So Many Fake Files. U Rarely See That On TPB [I Haven't At Least]
I’m Still Furious W/TS For Shutting My Access To Their Service Overnight With No Previous Explanation…I’m Still Hoping They Blow Up…I Can’t Tolerate The Stupidity Nether…If We’re All Compromised, Then Lets All Get Burned Together. But Their Choise Was To Act Like Queers ‘N’ Run Away From The Fire. We Don’t Need That Kind Of Weakness.
Not Me At Least… I’ve A 350GB HDD [That I Have Been Sharing For Years] At Almost Max Capacity.
A Gmail Account ‘N’ A Laptop Plus A Desktop With Loaded W/ More Stuff To Organize ‘N’ Later On Share.
I’ve Been Trough Napster, Winmx, Kazza, Emule ‘N’ Now Ares. Is It Fair To Me That 10 Years Of Sharing Get Trowed Out The Window When TS Decides To Feel Scaraed??? I Don’t Think So.
By The Way…I Know I Got Off The Main Subject. Freedom Of Speach…lol
given that its p2p it shouldnt matter really, the servers just indexing for the rest of it. and the rest of it is done by the users
New torrent tracker
http://nikito.su/forum
peers: >14.551
torrents: >5.734
new and nice torrent tracker:
http://www.passion-webcam.com
FullDls.com one of the biggest virused warez sites out there. The fact that the muppets at sumo have more fake files than anyone else, and the fact they have tons of spyware/trojan ads all over the place speak volumes.
Companies like this are nothing short of leechers..in so much they take, take, talk crap and add nothing but fake files and viruses to an already beliquered bit torrent network…the sooner sumo can be flushed out the better..they prey on people being stupid/gullible enough to download and to open there 10’s of thousands of fakes….so yeah 130 k all fake torrents sounds about right, from a crap traker and even crapper indexer..stay away from them, and use trackers you know are safe.
R.I.P SUMOTORRENTS
plz plz plz plz plz plz invite me !
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