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
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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…”)
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