BitTorrent Tracker Software “Gazelle” Debuts on What.cd
Written by Ben Jones on April 22, 2008After a sneak peak and trial run last month, the what.cd team has finally made a semi-public release of the Gazelle tracker and site software, by doing its first large scale roll-out on its own site.
Gazelle, as we reported back in November, is an attempt by the group to replace the aging and buggy TBsource. It is intended as a fast, flexible system, that reduces load on servers and databases, whilst increasing features.
Over the weekend, what.cd was upgraded, so that all of its roughly 43,000 members could try it. Whilst there were initial bugs, including a problem with IRC channel password keys, everything seems to be running smoothly now.
More of a problem was a DDOS the site experienced when it had just gone live to its members. The attack which lasted over 4 hours and pulled 100Mb/sec, frustrated a number of the site’s users.
Also a source of frustration for many was a misunderstanding over a ‘freeleech’ offer. Done as a stress test, it was canceled after 6 hours – the announcement about it said it could last 24.
Many users who grabbed stuff they wouldn’t have gotten otherwise in an attempt to increase their ratio, started downloads and still had them going when it was stopped, which lead to some friction between staff and users. As always, the golden rule is to never download something you don’t want in an attempt to boost ratio.
However, Gazelle is not just for music trackers. Another site, Ntorrents, will be changing over to it shortly, according to an administrator there. This will be as much of a test in many ways for Gazelle as this weekend’s launch on what.cd was. This time though, it will be testing its viability beyond music trackers.
The developers have not yet announced a release date beyond ‘when all the major bugs are fixed’. Stay tuned for more.
Previously: BitTorrent Throttling ISPs Exposed by Azureus
Next: Anti-Piracy Blunder Shuts Down BitTorrent Tracker
86 Responses
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Well as staff I can say for certain that freeleech stayed on for over 14hours after we announced it was ending. We needed to reduce load to fix issues, so announcing it was over without actually ending it saved any ratios of users that queued up and went afk. It is very likely that some users upload stats also did not report correctly, this is true with any site when the tracker goes offline. They may tell you leave your clients open and your stats will report correctly when the tracker is up but A: this is not always the case and B: most users fuck around and interrupt it even if it always did announce correctly after downtime.
-PLUR
1. no comments
2. no categories (icons are the best way to browse quickly)
3. required 50mb+ upload tax for any requests
4. did i mention NO COMMENTS?
5. no report button
6. did i mention no categories? the browse page is just an en entire page of huge + signs and very tiny artist/album text.
they shot themselves in the foot by taking away these basic functions of a bit torrent tracker.
gazelle isn’t open source, it was just going to be free to download. i’m betting its sloppy code written by a 17 year old kid for a few hours every weekend.
Please don’t Digg this
man2: All been fixed. Torrent comments work fine.
The request tax is an excellent idea IMO.
[quote comment="355251"]welldone is correct dave and its well deserved HOWEVER i have heard that the system has already been exploited and yes private trackes really do suck ass.
ps you cant spell slaughter without laughter
has TF got its own IRC channel?
i would defo like that…..[/quote]
we’ve got a quasi-official site at #torrentfreak on efnet
[quote=man2]
1. no comments
2. no categories (icons are the best way to browse quickly)
3. required 50mb+ upload tax for any requests
4. did i mention NO COMMENTS?
5. no report button
6. did i mention no categories? the browse page is just an en entire page of huge + signs and very tiny artist/album text.
they shot themselves in the foot by taking away these basic functions of a bit torrent tracker.
gazelle isn’t open source, it was just going to be free to download. i’m betting its sloppy code written by a 17 year old kid for a few hours every weekend.
[/quote]
I agree in a sense, I am the owner and developer of a private underground music site and when I see what you posted I can’t imagine doing that to the users of my site.
Also to the dude that said with this source it can be run on any server.. [b]WRONG[/b]. The only reason this is so fast is because they use the program memcached which can store information directly to the servers (or other servers) memory.
This makes important high stressed queries the ability to be cached for a certain time. Most sites that use or used (OiNK) this program often have another server for storing the cache info from the main one.
Therefor you now need 2 servers in order to keep a low load time, which in cost is pretty expensive. I’m pretty sure the devs for What.CD have coded the option to disable it… then the load times increase ten fold, because of the high stressed queries.
Rant end.
Well, when I heard they announced Gazelle I doubted very much. Now it seems like projects is moving forward.
However, such complex project is not easy to implement right. Let’s hope devs are experienced in building such systems and wish them good luck.
[quote comment="356035"]1. no comments
2. no categories (icons are the best way to browse quickly)
3. required 50mb+ upload tax for any requests
4. did i mention NO COMMENTS?
5. no report button
6. did i mention no categories? the browse page is just an en entire page of huge + signs and very tiny artist/album text.
[/quote]
1) Fixed.
2) Replaced by tags (which works better now that torrents can be filed under multiple genres). They can be searched for or browsed from torrents.php.
3) Many people believe just the opposite.
4) Did I mention FIXED?
5) Uh, yea there is.
6) Waffles runs this antiquated classification system, I’m sure you can find an invite.
Could I please get an invite to what.cd or waffles.fm?
I would like to try a private tracker.
My email is mrjoltz@gmail.com
Thank you to anybody that sends me one.
[quote comment="356132"]Could I please get an invite to what.cd or waffles.fm?
I would like to try a private tracker.
My email is mrjoltz@gmail.com
Thank you to anybody that sends me one.[/quote]
it won’t happen
[quote comment="355578"]Does a DDOS really increase page generation time?[/quote]
Yes because the server is being hammered with requests which drives up the CPU usage and bandwidth used.
[quote comment="356035"]1. no comments
2. no categories (icons are the best way to browse quickly)
3. required 50mb+ upload tax for any requests
4. did i mention NO COMMENTS?
5. no report button
6. did i mention no categories? the browse page is just an en entire page of huge + signs and very tiny artist/album text.
they shot themselves in the foot by taking away these basic functions of a bit torrent tracker.
gazelle isn’t open source, it was just going to be free to download. i’m betting its sloppy code written by a 17 year old kid for a few hours every weekend.[/quote]
correction. 16. A9 one of their lead coders is 16
wow ppl, if you don’t like what.cd you are probably not in it. The site has been up for little under 6 months of course it is not oink but it by no means sucks. If you don;t like it don’t use it it is that simple.
anyone got a What.cd invite?
willing to trade (i have many sites)
Damn… I started programming around 14, I can’t even have imagined myself putting out software 2 years after that. Now I’m 21 and still haven’t, because I know everything I work on can be improved so much….
I don’t expect gazelle to be released anytime soon, for the sole reason that they aren’t even near cleaning up their code for a stable release.
[quote comment="355525"][quote comment="355378"]What is just a shitty site, it is full of transcodes, mislabeled torrents and hit n runners. Now with gazelle, it’s still just a shitty site with a even shittier design.[/quote]
Do you have something better?[/quote]
Waffles.
From what ive heard fromnon ‘OMG WHAT IS AMAZING BECAUSE ITS PRIVATE’ loyalists it doesnt sound as good as they were originally boasting. I can’t personally comment because i deleted my what.cd account a month or two ago.
I didnt enjoy using the site, i had to in essence ‘hold off’ on downloading things jsut to get my ratio up, even then i had to download every single free leech thing they upped and generally ratio whore to have an acceptable ratio because BARELY ANYONE WILL DOWNLOAD ANYTHING THERE.
[quote comment="355968"][quote comment="355930"][quote comment="355842"][quote comment="355792"]The freeleech was actually left on for the full 24 hours. They just announced it was over after 6. Nobody actually suffered any ratio harm over it people just thought other people might have.[/quote]
can you speak for all 43k users? did they all tell you? did they all post?[/quote]
Is it possible that maybe he has insider information?[/quote]
i didnt know insiders can poll 43k users on what happened to every single one of them. i heard peoples ratios got fucked. and i have read that people up/down stats are weird and STILL not adding up correctly or counting at all[/quote]
lol, I guess site admins have no access to the data stored in their databases huh.
whoever said you need 2 servers you are wrong. we are running on one server right now. EVERYTHING
Tracker IRC Website etc etc We have 2 servers 1 is still boxed waiting to be shipped.
Unless you have facts don’t make statements that you cannot verify.
[quote comment="356154"][quote comment="355578"]Does a DDOS really increase page generation time?[/quote]
Yes because the server is being hammered with requests which drives up the CPU usage and bandwidth used.[/quote]
This page was created in 1.42647 second(s)
his page was created in 2.06319 second(s)
This page was created in 1.68837 second(s)
awesome
[quote]As always, the golden rule is to never download something you don’t want in an attempt to boost ratio.[/quote]
Golden rule my ass, sometimes that’s the only way to get a decent ratio when you’re starting out at a new site.
I got canned for making a negative comment in the waffles thread on gazelle and i have to agree its a complete bullshit reason. I had a fair amount of rare music to upload and i tried to - but uploading was not working i think this was a valid complaint.
But yeah a lot of people that made any kind of negative comment were banned from what.cd by whatman because they weren’t ‘constructive’ what kind of pretentious reason to ban someone is this WHEN THEY MADE THE COMMENT ON ANOTHER SITE.
So good luck to what.cd but if its mods and such are that fascist they’ll never ever be oink sorry.
yea its terable
so i hacked the gazelle forums today and here is a post from their private staff forums. i may post another. this is only to show you that its not secure.
http://pastebin.ca/993991
[quote comment="356401"][quote]As always, the golden rule is to never download something you don’t want in an attempt to boost ratio.[/quote]
Golden rule my ass, sometimes that’s the only way to get a decent ratio when you’re starting out at a new site.[/quote]
Or you could actually contribute something new and useful to the community instead of trying to cheat the system by being slick.
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