Demonii is one of these top BitTorrent trackers. The standalone tracker offers no torrents but merely coordinates communication between people who share files via sites such as The Pirate Bay.

After its launch last year, the tracker was embraced by The Pirate Bay who added it to all torrents by default. As a result the number of peers exploded, reaching 20 million at its peak last week.

Unlike most other large trackers Demonii has decided to open up its traffic statistics to the public. This allows us to see the ebb and flow of BitTorrent users from hour-to-hour and day-to-day, which offers a unique insight into the BitTorrent ecosystem.

The graph below shows the number of users that were connected to the Demonii tracker over the past week. One of the things that stands out is the variation over time.

BitTorrent users connected (CET)

Most people were connected to the tracker on Sunday afternoon U.S. time, which is Sunday evening in Europe. Last week nearly 20 million people were using the Demonii tracker during its peak. A few hours later, on Monday morning, this number had plummeted to 14 million.

Another statistic of interest is the number of connections these users make to the tracker. The graph below shows that Demonii is handling 2 million connections every minute, which is more than 3,333 connections per second.

The traffic patterns of the connections are similar to that of the number of peers, with Sunday being the busiest day.

Connections per minute

The statistics show that BitTorrent users are most active during the weekend, on Sunday in particular. The variations during the day are in line with the geographical popularity of BitTorrent, which peaks around noon in America and during the evening in Europe.

Earlier, the makers of uTorrent visualized the number of people starting up their BitTorrent clients on a typical day. The time lapse below is based on the number of check-ins and shows where the 60 million users were located.

Do you have a favorite day to use BitTorrent, or do you have your client up and running all week long? Feel free to let us know in the comments.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

However, for this content to travel from A to B the BitTorrent ecosystem needs reliable trackers. Unfortunately, good public trackers are harder to find.

For several years PublicBitTorrent and OpenBitTorrent have been dominating this space, coordinating the communication between dozens of millions of peers every day. The two trackers surfaced after The Pirate Bay shut down its BitTorrent tracker back in 2009 and haven’t seen much competition since.

In recent weeks, however, a new tracker called “Demonii” entered the scene. Similar to other standalone trackers Demonii doesn’t host any torrents. TorrentFreak caught up with the operator behind this new kid in town, and he told us that the name is inspired by Demonoid.

“I planned to revive Demonoid because they disappeared so quickly, so I registered the domains demonii.com, net and org,” Demonii’s Qarizma tells TorrentFreak.

“Then I actually realized that for me it wasn’t a good idea to start something like Demonoid. It would get me into trouble which I’m not interested in. So I decided to start the Demonii Tracker Project.”

After a slow start, traffic to the new tracker suddenly experienced a massive spike in traffic two weeks ago. Overnight it went from dealing with a handful of peers to millions, a surge that can be solely attributed to The Pirate Bay.

As it turned out, TPB had added the new tracker to all their magnet links, as they also do with OpenBitTorrent and PublicBitTorrent. Needless to say, Demonii wasn’t prepared and the newly gained attention quickly took the tracker offline.

“I didn’t expect it, Demonii was tracking about 100 torrents for testing and debugging, then I heard TPB used Demonii as tracker. That explained why my server went down,” Qarizma tells us.

However, Demonii did welcome the Pirate Bay blessing and after moving to a new server it quickly recovered. At the time of writing Demonii tracks 875,365 torrents and handles 4,165,485 peers, which makes it the fifth largest BitTorrent tracker on the Internet.

Like most of the other large BitTorrent trackers Demonii runs on the beerware licensed Opentracker software. Demonii’s operator made some small modifications to make it run smoothly on his VPS, which he can expand later if needed.

“Demonii currently runs on a KVM based VPS on my own nodes. The main node is a Xeon X5677, and the VPS specs are 512MB RAM and 1000Mhz is still enough to run it now. When it needs more I can simply allocate more resources to the VPS.”

In addition to operating the Demonii tracker the owner also offers privacy protection software that may come in handy for some.

Dprotect

The free application named “dProtect” is a blocklist addon for uTorrent. It bans a long list of IP-ranges that may be connected to monitoring companies, government agencies and other outfits that may interfere with BitTorrent traffic.

“dProtect is our software released to increase people’s privacy on the internet. The software adds a layer of protection when you are downloading using uTorrent,” Qarizma says.

The dProtect software uses a list of ranges maintained by The Blocklist Group. Similar to other blocklists, the list is only partially effective.

It will be interesting to see if Demonii remains among the top trackers in the months to come. If The Pirate Bay keeps supporting it there is no doubt that the new kid in town will stick around for a while.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.