BitTorrent Behind the Scenes: isoHunt

This summer TorrentFreak features the workstations and offices belonging to some of the leading figures in the BitTorrent community. In our first article in this series the founder of BTjunkie was kind enough to give us a little insight into his daily operations, and today we continue with isoHunt.

Founded in 2003, isoHunt is one of the oldest BitTorrent sites that remains around today. The site has millions of pageviews a day and searches through more than 2 million torrent files, which totals an impressive 1729 terabytes of data.

Gary Fung, the founder of the site, is in charge of daily operations from his hometown Vancouver in Canada. Below is a picture of Gary sitting behind his 2008 Mac Pro hooked up to a Dell 30″ LCD monitor (3008WFP).

What’s really keeping the site up and running is not his Mac though, rather the 14 servers located in Ontario, Canada. Below is a picture of the server rack currently in use. Gary told us that he is working on adding another cluster in Europe soon.

isoHunt is currently using four dual quadcore Opteron 2352’s for the web servers. The site’s database runs on three additional servers, two Opteron and one Intel Nehalem based. Four old dual core AMD nodes are used for various background processing, one Intel, dualcore Xeon is used by the search backend and two more for load balancing.

Below you’ll find another picture isoHunt’s server rack, all wired up. We thank Gary for sharing this with us, and we will continue our behind the scenes series this weekend with a brand new workspace of another torrent site admin.