Yes, all those nay-sayers and early fans that have populated the comment sections of our previous stories on Gazelle can finally prove the exploits and bad coding that they’ve been claiming, as the first public release candidate of the script is now available for download.

Reactions from those that have given the site a try, have been mostly positive. The main negative comments stem from the fact it’s not an intuitive install. Part of that comes from the memory caching software , memcached , which gives the project its ‘blazing speed’. Also, right now the system uses XBTT as a tracker, but we’re told that it will have its own (multithreaded) tracker ready for later versions, codenamed ‘Ocelot’.

Also, as things stand, while they hoped for around a doubling of capacity over the older TBsource script, in practice it’s become more like double that, meaning a 10,000 user site under TBSource can probably handle 40,000 without any major difference in site response or system load. Project head WhatMan told TorrentFreak: “We out-shot our initial projections by a very wide margin.”

Interest in Project Gazelle has been fairly strong, and at least half a dozen sites are now running the new script. Perhaps more interestingly, though, is that Gazelle isn’t JUST a torrent site. Due to its modular nature, it can be used for regular sites as well. It’s a bit like a content management system in that respect, and perhaps our earlier comparison to Diferior wasn’t all that far from the mark.

If you’re interested in getting your hands on the Gazelle code, then just head over to the project site and follow the instructions. The whole kit-and-caboodle is released under a modified version of the GPL, so have fun.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Speed, however, has been greatly improved over older codes, as well as hardware impact. Its developers estimate that a site running Gazelle can handle approximately twice the number of users that an existing TBsource based site can, on the same machinery, meaning sites can either add more users, or reduce server costs. Contrary to earlier beliefs, a tracker will be offered with the project when it goes public, meaning that everything needed to create a site will be included in one easy package.

How easy is that package to use, though? For the user, it’s very easy. Many people have got used to uploading a torrent file, then having to re-download it before they can start seeding. It’s annoying, and often confuses first time uploaders. Now, if the private flag is applied when the torrent is made, no re-download is needed. It may be a little touch, but it’s one that helps.

Other small touches include tagging, by genre, or style, or whatever the site wants to allow. For films, it means the likes of ‘Rush Hour’ can be tagged ‘comedy’ and ‘action’, allowing easier navigation, and avoiding those questioning niggles of ‘is it more comedy, or more action’ that existing genre-based category systems cause. Having found the title you want, other versions of the same item, in differing formats can be found there too. Again, all this is customizable by the site admin.

Admin tools also seem easy to use, and manage, with less frustrations. Modifying the code to fit the particular needs of a site will also be relatively easy. That’s not to say it’s going to be for everyone. If you’re looking for a small site, then something along the lines of Diferior may be better.

As for downsides, well, it’s an alpha product at the moment, so there are still a lot of bugs to be worked out. Existing TBsource themes will not work with Gazelle, but i’m told they should be fairly easy to create for anyone with experience in making themes. However, it is a positive step moving tracker software forward. The torrent world has needed an easy to use replacement for the aging TBsource, and Gazelle seems like it will fit the bill. How it actually behaves in practice, and the experiences of those starting to deploy it from scratch, are something we will have to wait and see about. Yet, for only 4 months work, it is showing phenomenal potential.

Screenshots

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

It is of course not clear what this all means, but without an official message from the Demonoid team, speculation has started. Could it be that the site has found a new host, and preparing a return? Many former Demonoid members are secretly hoping that this is indeed the case.

Last December, Deimos, the founder and main admin of what used to be one of the most popular BitTorrent trackers, posted a message on the Subdemon forums on the possibility of a return. At the time he wrote: “Money is an issue, but the real problem at the moment is finding a suitable place to host the website. There has been no luck there. And there’s some personal stuff I need to take care of that takes most of my time at the moment, and that does not help.”

For those who forgot, here is a recap of what has happened so far. The trouble for Demonoid started back in June, when the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN started to put pressure on Demonoid and their ISP, Leaseweb. Deimos decided that the Netherlands wasn’t the safe haven it used to be and he to moved the site to Canada, which resulted in a few days of downtime.

Deimos never really told the administrators or members of the site exactly what was happening. Initially, most members assumed that there was some hardware failure, but after a few days it became clear that Demonoid was more or less forced to move. Maybe there could have been hardware failures too, who knows, but the outcome was the same – Canada here we come.

Relocating the servers to Canada initially solved the problems, but, by the end of September Deimos took Demonoid offline for the second time. Again, nobody knew what was going on until we found out that the CRIA was responsible for the downtime, which was later confirmed by Deimos. It turned out that Canada wasn’t the best choice after all.

After 5 days of downtime the site returned, now blocking all traffic from Canadian users in an attempt to calm down the CRIA. At first it looked like the storm was finally over, but on November 9th Demonoid’s users were welcomed by a disappointing message on the frontpage explaining that the CRIA was indeed responsible for the downtime.

So will Demonoid ever return? The fact that the tracker is back online, in a different location seems to suggest that there is something happening.

Update: February 20, tracker offline again after 3 days uptime.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

December 2006

576.080 torrents,
4.274.698 peers

December 2007

914.717 torrents
8.390.682 peers

To keep up with the growing demand from its users, The Pirate Bay has added more and more hardware to their server park. Another significant change this year is the migration from Anakata’s Hypercube to the open source Opentracker software. The new software is more stable, uses less resources and supports UDP tracking.

The Pirate Bay’s Brokep told TorrentFreak that they should be able to double the amount of peers on the trackers without any hardware upgrades. “Since the last performance tweaking and router-tweaking we’ve removed all bottlenecks.” Brokep said, and he expects the tracker to hit 10 million peers during the next big holiday.

There is also a downside to this positive news of course. The growth of The Pirate Bay is in part due to the problems at Demonoid had this year and the fact that Isohunt (TorrentBox) disabled access for US users to their trackers because of the issues they have with the MPAA.

Demonoid and TorrentBox were the second and the fourth most used public BitTorrent tracker respectively, so this was a great loss. It is estimated that approximately 50% of all public .torrent files are now tracked by The Pirate Bay, it is scary to imagine what will happen if their servers will stop working.

Luckily there’s also good news, as new trackers such as sumotracker.org and denis.stalker.h3q.com became pretty popular in just a few months. Both newcomers track more than a million peers now. Besides this, The Pirate Bay have already announced that they’re not going anywhere. They told us that they will simply move to another country if they are outlawed in Sweden, without downtime!

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

If you’re looking for high speed downloads, a free Usenet trial might be a good alternative.

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.

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.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The team behind XBTIT (previously BTiTracker) are hoping to achieve just that with their latest beta version.

XBTIT enables potential site administrators to quickly and easily set up their own BitTorrent tracker, something that was previously only available to people with some coding skills.

In order to make the process as user-friendly as possible, the team are offering some major upgrades and features:

Optional SMF Forum Integration

SMF is a fully featured bulletin board system which is very easy to set up. Downloaded and installed separately, user accounts are fully integrated with XBTIT after installation so there is no need for multiple log ins.

Optional XBT Tracker Integration

XBT Tracker is a BitTorrent tracker written in C++. The advantages of using this is that you can have many more peers than a traditional PHP based tracker while consuming very few resources on your server, making ownership of a very large tracker a reality.

One Click Hack/Modification Installation

All the best trackers have great modifications designed to bring additional functionality to the site. However, installing these can still be quite a task for the experienced – and absolutely mind-blowing for the novice. XBTIT offers One-Click-Hack which means no more having to hack away at lines of code to install the latest modifications for your tracker. An automated system for hack installation is included which is great news for the novice.

Fully Customizable Template System

This means there is no requirement to hack away at code to change the look of your site. Templates are now totally separate from the tracker source so it’s possible to tinker with the look of the site without worrying about breaking anything. New templates will be available with the final version of the software.

Updated Installation Routine

The new installation routine takes care of everything that previously had to be done by hand, saving much time when installing a new tracker.

The XBTIT team told us they are proud to be leading the way with what they believe is the most customizable and accessible tracker to date, and they are inviting any interested TorrentFreak readers to apply for beta testing at www.btiteam.org

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Torrents are deleted from trackers
Some trackers, like Demonoid.com have policies that require them to remove torrents from a tracker if they are older than a year. This way they save server resources, because a lot of the older torrents are unseeded, but still indexed by some sites, which means that the tracker is bombarded with unnecessary requests.

Trackers Die
Unfortunately BitTorrent trackers don’t live forever.

Trackers experience Downtime
A lot of BitTorrent trackers go down every now and then. Most of the time they return after a few minutes or hours, but still, the torrent won’t work when they’re down.

So, how do we solve this problem? Basically, there are two things you can do to guarantee that your torrent will stay alive. Of course these tips will only work with public trackers.

1. Use Multi-tracker Torrents
Several BitTorrent clients allow you to add multiple trackers to a torrent upon creation. So, if you add three trackers, the second one will take over if the first one fails. The multi-tracker feature was first proposed by John Hoffman, and is now supported by several clients including Azureus, BitComet, BitTornado and uTorrent.

2. Enable DHT
DHT stands for “Distributed Hash Table”. If a web based tracker goes down, the torrents stay alive because peers can act as “nodes” keeping the swarm intact, and the torrent alive. So you could say that the DHT layer serves as a peer-to-peer tracker. The DHT feature is available on Azureus, Bitcomet, uTorrent and several other BitTorrent clients.

Do these two things and your much less likely do develop a headache when you’re favourite Linux distribution stops downloading. ;-)

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The article compares bt.etree.org, piratebay.org, torrentportal.com, easytree.org, btefnet.net and alluvion.org. The data appears to be a little outdated, because both easytree.org and the famous bt.etree.org were shutdown in spring 2005.

One of the main conclusions of the researchers is that a relatively small percentage of peers is responsible for most of the uploading. The top 10% sharers upload just as much as the rest of the people in the swarm.

Another interesting finding is that the highest percentage of seeders can be found at The Piratebay (29%), and the most sharers at easytree (59%). This can be explained by the fact that easytree is a private tracker, enforcing “healthy” share ratios.

Unfortunately, the authors make a big mistake when they suggest that RSS feeds might be responsible for the higher seed percentages at btefnet.net. At the time the data was collected (early 2005) only Azureus had experimental RSS support, and only a few people were actually using it.

Personally I think it it hard to make comparisons between there six torrent sites. It is nothing more than comparing apples and oranges, they offer different content, and target a different audience.

Gifting Technologies: A BitTorrent Case Study

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

It appears that Demonoid teamed-up with searching.com. Searching.com is a search engine that is buying itself into several BitTorrent sites in order to boost their alexa ranking (more on this later).

This deal brings in some extra cash for demonoid, so they are finally able to keep on growing.

At this point Demonoid already is one of the most popular public BitTorrent trackers, together with The Piratebay. As a semi-private tracker they even made it into the list of the 1000 most popular sites on the Internet (no. 983).

On demonoid we read:

We are now working in conjunction with Searching.com
Among other benefits, this will allow us to open the registrations more often, as you may have noticed by messages indicating we plan to open them once a week, and will be very good for Demonoid in the long run.

Finally people can stop begging for Demonoid invites! To illustrate how desperately people want these invites, here’s a true story.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Within no time the post became the “most commented post” on this site. I decided to close the comments, but that resulted in numerous “demonoid invite please” emails to the email address listed in the contact section.

The “invite begs will be ignored” message didn’t stop people from sending them anyway. My last, and most desperate move was to include the following line in the demonoid post

If you want an invite, take a picture of yourself holding a cardboard sign with “demonoid invite please” written on it.

I was convinced that this would scare most people away.

But a couple of hours after I posted that line the first photo’s started to appear in my inbox. Some real ones, some photoshopped, some black with the excuse that the camera fell in the water. As shocked as I was by these responses, so I decided to take down the message, and live with the invite begs. As you can see, I’ve included an extra adsense block to pay for the expenses.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

SqrtBoy is known for his work on Torrent Trader Lite, VBTT, IPBTT and other several BitTorrent tracker php/mysql scripts. It is great to see that someone is proposing a standard for BitTorrent rss feeds.

Every webmaster probably has his own thoughts about how the perfect rss feed would look, but this document is definitely a step forward.

SqrtBoy told TorrentFreak:

I have found that each rss feed was different from one site to another, and from a BitTorrent script to another. The multiplication and organization of different feeds formats was leading to confusion and was making it difficult to read in rss clients, and also some other feed indexing applications. The purpose of this document is to give some recommendations to webmasters on how a rss 2.0 BitTorrent related feed should be designed, so maybe we can see a standard appearing.

I think it is extremely important to have a proper standard for BitTorrent rss feeds, especially since the number of people that get their latest torrents though feedreaders, media players and BitTorrent clients is growing.

Using the same feed style will only benefit the usability of BitTorrent & rss, and their implementation in feed based TV players like Democracy, Fireant and IM.

BitTorrent RSS 2.0 Feed Specifications White Paper

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.