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Mininova.org Servers and Traffic: 2006 vs 2007

Ernesto — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 21:24:07 +0000

Mininova is without a doubt the most popular BitTorrent site in terms of traffic. According to Alexa they are among the 100 most visited sites on the Internet, more popular than Digg.com, Apple.com and TorrentFreak.com for example.

In September Mininova received over 70.000.000 visitors that generated more than 300.000.000 pageviews, and they’re still growing. In October the number of daily visitors gets close to 3 million a day which means that they can get close to 100 million visitors this month.

And there are some changes if we compare 2006 and 2007

visitors per day: 980.000 vs 2.800.000

pageviews per day: 4.250.000 vs 13.750.000

searches per day: 500.000 vs 3.250.000

downloads per day: 110.000 vs 280.000

torrents in database: 150.000 vs 500.000

Many people might wonder what is needed to keep a site like this running, so did we, and we asked the Mininova team for an update. Last time we did a post about Mininova’s server setup they had 7 servers in total, but times have changed. As you can see in the picture below (click to enlarge), Mininova is now running on an impressive 19 servers.

More info about the servers can be found over here; they really like Opteron. I’m really curious how many servers they will need a year from now. We’ll keep you updated.

Niek, thanks for your amazing Visio skills.

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Police Has No Evidence Against The Pirate Bay

Ernesto — Sat, 19 May 2007 10:31:50 +0000

During the Pirate Bay raid in May of last year, the Swedish police confiscated 180 servers, most of which had no trace of TPB’s data. Despite the fact that the “offending” data that needs to be analysed has already been copied, the servers have not been returned to TPB up until today.

The police and prosecutor HÃ¥kan Roswall desperately tried to find something they could use against the Pirate Bay crew, but it now seems that they have very little to go on. Brokep, one of the Pirate Bay admins writes on his blog:

“I talk to alot of people that are somehow connected to other interesting people – one of them told me that the police officer in charge of the case against The Pirate Bay actually has _nothing_ to give the District Attorney. Still he’s pressing charges.”

Last December, the district court decided that the servers, including some servers of The Pirate Bay’s ISP, PRQ, that have nothing to do with the BitTorrent tracker, would remain in custody till June 1, 2007. Time is running out guys.

In hindsight, the raid was highly unsuccessful. TPB was only down for a couple of days before they returned in full force, even stronger than before, thanks to the widespread media attention.

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

Streaming and Downloading Torrents in Firefox

Ernesto — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 21:12:51 +0000

The extension is developed by the Silicon Valley based company RedSwoosh, which was recently aquired by Akamai. FoxTorrent integrates BitTorrent downloads with so called “Swoosh links“, and works on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

p2p-blog did an early review and reports that the extension still has some issues. It causes major memory leaks and it doesn’t work with SSL-secured servers like those from BitTorrent.com.

I’ve quickly tested the audio and video streaming capabilities of the extension, and found that it worked surprisingly well. However, the problem with streaming is that the chunks can’t be downloaded at random, which slows down the speed of the download. Moreover, streaming only works if the download speeds are high enough, which is often a problem.

One thing’s for sure, Bram Cohen is not going to shit his pants (yet).

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