Mininova Downtime Puts BitTorrent Sites Under Pressure
Written by Ernesto on April 29, 2008The popular BitTorrent site mininova has been down for a few hours due to hardware issues. It is expected that the downtime will continue for several hours, which puts other BitTorrent sites under pressure.
Mininova’s Erik told TorrentFreak that there are problems with the network card of the loadbalancer, one of the parts they don’t have a backup for.
The mininova team is working hard to get the site up and running again. The good news is that no data will be lost, the bad news is that it may take a while - possibly 12 hours - because it is a holiday in The Netherlands.
Mininova’s forums are not connected to the loadbalancer, and are still up and running. The same is true for the seeds of their featured content section. Mininova currently has well over 3 million unique visitors per day, and more than 15 million pageviews, which makes them the BitTorrent site with the most traffic.
Consequently, the downtime at Mininova has resulted in quite a few extra visitors for several other BitTorrent sites. Flippy, the admin of Torrentz.com told TorrentFreak that he’s seeing a 50% traffic increase, which works out at tens of thousands of visitors an hour. As a result, Flippy has had a tough time keeping his site running smoothly, and other BitTorrent site admins are reporting similar traffic boosts.
For now Torrentz is doing fine, except for a few server connection issues every now and then. It’s a pretty scary thought that server issues at mininova can almost bring down the fourth largest BitTorrent site. A whole ring of BitTorrent sites could potentially collapse like a house of cards.
update: SumoTorrent went down for 6 hours as well because the site was overloaded
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52 Responses
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Come back soon MN
More hydras needed!
larger pipes innit
I like Mininova. It seems to have more accurate searches and the comments are usually helpful.
We’ve seen an increase of over 200% but our servers are holding up just fine.
Give us this day our daily torrent.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive them that trespass against us.
[quote comment="363252"]We’ve seen an increase of over 200% but our servers are holding up just fine.[/quote]
Does that mean double or triple?
[quote comment="363235"]More hydras needed![/quote]
Yep :)
If that happened we’d all be relegated to p2p and blogs. I believe WinMX is still operating ;)
Here is the weakness of the bittorrent protocol : it is not decentralised…
:-(
At least there is the DHT.
Wait, are we all forgetting mininova is just a listing website? Sure it’s great, I agree with that, but these torrents are all tracked somewhere else, many from the pirate bay. I wouldn’t say it’s not “decentralised” in fact that was the excitement about bittorrent in the first place!
Temporarily Offline
Due to hardware problems Mininova will be offline for a short while. Please be patient and check back in a couple of hours.
While you are waiting you could visit our Forum or video website Snotr.
Thanks for understanding,
– The Mininova staff
[quote comment="363271"][quote comment="363252"]We’ve seen an increase of over 200% but our servers are holding up just fine.[/quote]
Does that mean double or triple?[/quote]
It depends if they mean an addition of 200% or that it increased from the original (100%) TO 200% of the original.
Hey, watch out. The apostle Matthew is loosing faith. Prayer won’t make more trackers appear. God doesn’t do file sharing. It’s our challenge to grow the apple trees and pass the apples around.
VIVE MININ
I can’t live without mininova.
Come back sooooooooon!
How about we take the hydra concept beyond the threat Hercules posed to it. The ancient hydra could grow heads and it was poisonous. The real hydra (check out the wikipedia) can grow tentacles and it’s poisonous. However, it has one other advantage. It can reproduce asexually. Yeah, I assume it ain’t no fun to do that, but it’s a strategy where the offspring inherit exactly the same genes from the parent.
Assuming the trackers are important because they take the time to learn about the fakers and how to fend them off. This knowledge could be inherited by those who connect to the tracker. So, a leecher could “inherit” the “genes” from a tracker and take them home. Okay, that’s not very hygienic, I admit.
Instead of a DHT cloud with no knowledge about parasites, this asexual reproduction could produce a lot of little trackers. They run on millions of home computers and serve a couple of seeders and leechers each. The cloud should not be split up among the trackers of course. After some time these trackers die, because the strategies how to keep the fakers away will be obsolete and new strategies need to be learned from “real” trackers.
This is a lot like Demonoid in the sense that the public torrent community can be considerably slowed down when a major site goes down. There needs to simply be more sites out there but given the status of file sharing in most countries, plus the needed resources, it’s just not happening fast enough.
TPB > MN
the end
BitTorrent IS decentralised.. It’s just a single website that is down. Mininova is just one site, out of countless torrent sites.
Where’s the orange signs with “Right Lane Closed” as they work on the tubes?
Lame…just when I was going upload content to the featured distribution service, it goes down. Go figure.
HOLY CRAP!!!!! say it isn’t so!!!
torrentz is the one to go
hurry up and get running again wtf!
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