EFNet Reaches 100,000 Concurrent Connections

Mortin writes "The largest IRC network in the world, EFNet, has set another world-record max user count after breaking an astonishing 100,000 concurrent users earlier tonight!"

Comments

dang

[ramdac]

I missed it!

Re:dang

[Jelque]

And you thought Efnet was dead or dying.

Not necessarily good...

[David Price]

...after breaking an astonishing 100,000 concurrent users earlier tonight!

I sure hope they fixed them all afterward.

Re:Not necessarily good...

[thefalconer]

Makes you wonder what all of them where doing.

Efnet summed up in one line.

[Inominate]

You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy, we must be cautious.

Re:Efnet summed up in one line.

[Karamchand]

You will. Just go to this site.

Re:Efnet summed up in one line.

[sabine]

depends on the channel.

(sometimes you have to choose betweeen scum -or- villiany.)

With the new Linux kernel...

[ralmeida]

...they can do it in 2 seconds!

DALNet anyone?

[bbuda]

According to their homepage, DALnet boasts 140,000 concurrent users. I'm not sure how each of these networks are measuring their numbers, but maybe this isn't quite a world record...

Re:DALNet anyone?

[mickwd]

It's been at these volumes for a few months on DALnet. Right now there's 127,488 users, according to one of the servers.

Mind you, half of those users seem to be spambots.

Re:DALNet anyone?

[AntiNorm]

But DALnet, as with any other network that reaches this size -- including EFnet -- has more than its fair share of problems. The lag and netsplits get intolerable at this level. Also, networks of this size can be difficult to connect to due to script kiddies, server overload, etc (or in the case of EFnet, yellowbellied admins who refuse to open up their I: lines). I personally know of large channels that have recently moved off of both networks because of these problems. Not that it's necessarily a bad thing that it has hit this size, but no network can handle infinite users. A userload like this brings out a network's weaknesses in full force.

Re:DALNet anyone?

[KeyserDK]

Actually QuakeNet is amazingly stable.
And that's being the fastest growing irc network in the world - they are currently the 2nd largest network.

Re:DALNet anyone?

[suss]

DALNet has just had a bad period of DDoS attacks, a couple of servers still haven't rejoined.
The attacks resolved themselves within about a week, when the IP for irc.dal.net was changed to 127.0.0.1, which turned the attacks on the kiddies themselves (quite hilarious).

By the way, most of the attacks seem to be coming from universities like Harvard, Emory, etc... You'd think they would have something better to do with their time.

Re:DALNet anyone?

[Dalroth]

By the way, most of the attacks seem to be coming from universities like Harvard, Emory, etc... You'd think they would have something better to do with their time.

Well, it's not like the college students at Harvard or Emory are doing the DDoS, it's the people (aka some pimply faced low-lifes still living in their parents basements without a job) who hacked into the Harvard/Emory machines that are the cause of the problem. It's also the fault of the Harvard/Emory admins for not noticing and not doing something to stop said attacks.

Re:DALNet anyone?

[GigsVT]

Actually, all these numbers point out how badly IRC scales, and by extension p2p, even when you have a clearly defined set of servers.

AOL, Prodigy, CServe all had many times over 100,000 users easily on 1994 server hardware.

Re:DALNet anyone?

[MoneyT]

AOL, Prodigy, CServe all had many times over 100,000 users easily on 1994 server hardware.

Hate to break it to you, but AOLs service is crappy.

Re:DALNet anyone?

[GigsVT]

It wasn't bad in 1994, believe it or not. The lines were rarely busy, etc... The only reason I know is because I live out in BFE and back then the major services were the only thing going, it wasn't like there were many options.

Re:DALNet anyone?

[iamacat]

It must be a badly broken design then. I can't see how you will have more than 50 users per channel and still be able to talk. You'll have to split it like Yahoo chat does. A good protocol will choose one server to "host" a channel (or maybe one server per country, coast, 1K miles etc) and have everyone joining talk directly to that server(s), instead of having them bother the rest of the network. You could even do peer to peer - have one of the users run a temporary server and automatically migrate it to the next user with the best ping when s\he leaves. This will not add any load, since anyway each user gets all the messages in a channel.
The server network will then just have to synchronize channel information. With 100K users, there will be maybe 10K channels which is a pretty small amount of information. Even then, you can have servers partition this information, let's say based on MD5 of channel name. Then, let's say 10 servers will synchronize channels with given hash range between each other to guard against network failures.

Re:DALNet anyone?

[Chroneos]

I'm not really much for this IRCsizing anymore, I would really like to know how many of those are legitimate users anyway. I'm actively on DALnet and Undernet, and in ircII I have a constantly updated LUSERS count in my input line, and I've seen both networks exceed 100,000 users. I'm reminded of a line you would see on Undernet in WALLOPS when a new max userload was made, "We would like to thank all the clonebots that made this possible". Besides, it's not the size, it's the quality, right? ;-)

Too bad we can't measure quality.

Re:DALNet anyone?

[sheriff_p]

Which turned the attacks on the kiddies themselves?

Assuming these attacks were sending excessive traffic to the servers, how would the server IP address being changed to localhost make the kiddies attack themselves? Are you trying to say that it's possible to flood yourself off the net by sending packets to your loop back device?

Re:DALNet anyone?

[drik00]

i remember being on AOL when i first started out back in 1995, and, IIRC AOL had a coulple hundred thousand subscribers, but at any given time, only about 20k were online at a time

(this was well before most people ever touched any online/internet service, and when they did, it was brief because you were charged per minute, which adds up fast)

J

Re:DALNet anyone?

[drik00]

me and my friends split off and run off of our own little server now, usually hanging at about 18-25 users with no more than 5-6 channels at any given time.

I havent missed Efnet since I left...

J

Re:DALNet anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone doing a DDoS could have up to 100 slave computers doing the flooding for them. You only have to send out enough packets to tell your dos net which IP to target next. You could very easily DoS yourself yourself off the net if you made the mistake of sending out 127.0.0.1 as your next target.

Re:DALNet anyone?

[Disoculated]

AOL had 2.5 million subscribers in 1995 with a high water of about 75k users, a large proportion of which were chatting (especially since high waters back then were driven by auditorium chats). Say what you want about AOL 'sucking'. IRC sucked much worse back then and has not gotten much better since.

Re:DALNet anyone?

[blincoln]

this was well before most people ever touched any online/internet service, and when they did, it was brief because you were charged per minute, which adds up fast

Maybe I was just lucky, but I started using local ISPs in 1992 or 1993, and I've never paid by the minute. I remember when AOL came online, and I couldn't figure out why people were letting themselves get jacked so seriously.

Re:DALNet anyone?

[noz]

It's a shame DALnets services are what makes it so popular becuase it's exactly this which keeps me on EFnet. Extra channel modes that prevent people without a registered nickname seem to prevent me from joining my regulars because the services are down. Changing /msg NickServ to /nickserv might be a good security feature *cough* but it prevents standard applications and add-on scripts from running.

Re:DALNet anyone?

[rekoil]

That is incorrect - the slave computers will send the DoS traffic to themselves, not back to the master. The master will just sit there wondering why his target is still live.

Re:DALNet anyone?

[Erroneous Coward]

I just want to point out that while the services you point out had very a very large number of users on "1994 server hardware", IRC servers operate on 3 or more year old OTS hardware and free software, so your point of "scales well" is not proven. They are almost using 1994 server hardware now.

The problems you see are due to the fact that everything that an IRC network uses is donated, from the bandwidth and the server hardware to the time it takes to maintain the network topology in a state that can handle the 100,000 connections.

IMO IRC scales extremely well, and most of the problems you see on DALnet are likely due in large part to people abusing the network. Lag and splits? Get rid of the spambots and the DDOS idiots, and they will go away.

Re:DALNet anyone?

[LilGuy]

Not to mention it wouldn't be going back to the script kiddies because the kiddies were running the DDOS off many other computers.. not their own...

Re:DALNet anyone?

[LilGuy]

obviously you were just lucky... all we had in my hometown back then were BBS' and AOL. That's it. There were a couple of ISP start-ups, but from what we heard from people using them was that they weren't worth the money at all. We simply couldn't wait for AOL to switch to its unlimited plan.. hah...

Re:DALNet anyone?

[muon1183]

Yeah, I read the little blurb, and Immediately, I started thinking, this can't be right. I am a regular dalnet user, and about a month or two ago, just before those blasted DOS attacks started, things were slow as mud, and we were trying to figure out why. Turns out, there were 254,000 people connected to JUST ONE SERVER. Of course, the DOS attacks started about a day after this, and then they were down to about 200 real connections. However, dalnet is back up and running smooth as ever these days (it hasn't been netsplitting so much anymore).

Re:DALNet anyone?

[moonbender]

IMO IRC scales extremely well, and most of the problems you see on DALnet are likely due in large part to people abusing the network. Lag and splits? Get rid of the spambots and the DDOS idiots, and they will go away.

Absolutely correct. IRC is (obviously) vulnerable to abuse, but that doesn't mean it doesn't scale well.
One typical IRC user generates, what, 20 bytes (=chars) per second of traffic upstream and 500 bytes downstream (user perspective)? That's 0.02 kps up and 0.5 kps down. Well, if it's not a user but an abuser, that traffic goes up by a facter of 100 or more. If you've got a lot of people doing that, the server is bound to choke on it, although it could quite easily manage the same number of regular users.
I'm sure the same problems apply for AOL chat services, and would have applied 8 years ago.

Re:DALNet anyone?

[roachmotel3]

When I interned at AOL in 1999, they were pushing over 1 Million (yes, 1,000,000) simultaneous users. Considering current growth curves, I'd imagine that they are twice that now, if not more.

Re:DALNet anyone?

[TheLostOne]

High time those applications and add-on scripts updated themselves... /quote nickserv /raw nickserv

Re:DALNet anyone?

[sydneyfong]

Most probably the attacks origined from trojans installed on compromised machines. The trojans would most likely have "irc.dal.net" or whatever hostname they're trying to attack, instead of the IP address. So when the trojan tries to resolve the hostname, they get 127.0.0.1, and thus flooding themselves.

Btw, try this on your own machine
$ ping -f localhost

and see your CPU load increase...

Re:DALNet anyone?

[richie2000]

A userload like this brings out a network's weaknesses in full force.

I may sound like a grumpy old bastard, but I remember during Desert Storm when IRC first packed over 400 users in at the same time. And we had bad netsplits and lags back then too...

'course, this was before the Great Renaming and the permanent netsplits, we just had one IRC then and we liked it! Now, where did you young whippersnappers put my cane? I need to go again.

Re:DALNet anyone?

[Thomas Charron]

WOOT! I'm NOT alone! ;-)

And then there was the whopping 1k user mark if I recall about a year and a half later? Thats about the point when some of the servers started to drop off becouse the bandwidth had gone from miniscule to a bit excessive..

Re:DALNet anyone?

[Thomas Charron]

Actually, it says NOTHING about p2p. It speaks of the fact that IRC wasn't designed to DO this. Even the RFC states, 'This WILL not scale'. All traffic within IRC is distributed to all servers. Couple that with the fact that it uses a simple tree setup for server, aka, you can only have one route to a given server, thru other servers.

Re:DALNet anyone?

[iamacat]

Obviously you have a single client connect to a server for each channel it joined. I would guess few people join more than 5 channels at once.

Re:DALNet anyone?

[richie2000]

WOOT! I'm NOT alone! ;-)

Of course not, and there should be 398 more of us, too. :-)

Re:DALNet anyone?

[kelnos]

hmm, when i ping -f myself, top tells me ping is eating about 35% cpu.

interesting is if i run four ping -f's on myself at once, top reports ping using about 13-14% cpu each. and setiathome is still chugging along, eating up the remaining. actually, no. dchpd (i'm running it on my tiny internal lan) is hitting 10% for no apparent reason. i wonder what's causing that...

100,000?

[Anonymous Coward]

100,000 concurrent threads?
100,000 concurrent irc sessions?

I guess the next article is gonna be:

100,000th Geek Marries Non-Mailorder Bride

KaZaA

[Cryogenes]

has just broken the 3.000.000 concurrent users level
(that's twice what Napster had at its peak).

Re:KaZaA

[UpnAtom]

The numbers on Kazaa are obviously distorted or outright lies.

Re:KaZaA

[enneff]

Actually, the nature of the semi-independant p2p system (consisting of nodes and supernodes) prevents any one user from searching every user on the system. Not only that, but the more leeches you're surrounded by, the less chance you'll have of finding anything interesting.

Why a network like this should be used for anything other than porn is beyond me - any other media is pretty dubious as far as encode quality goes, and there's nothing rare enough that's accessible to warrant the sacrifice.

Re:KaZaA

[Jordy]

Just a correction, Napster's peak user loan was 2.2 million simultaneous connections, not 1.5 million.

I'm not completely sure that Kazaa doesn't inflate their numbers (its fairly hard to get truly accurate counts of connections in a distirbuted network.)

Re:KaZaA

[Cyno01]

yeah, but i'm still not gettign any more/better search results

Re:KaZaA

[Cryogenes]

cnn says 1.57 million simultaneous users max on Napster

http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/internet/07/16/fast .t rack.downloads.idg/

Re:KaZaA

[Jordy]

Yes, but you see I was sitting watching the numbers on the load balancer at the time, so I think I know a little better than CNN. :)

Re:KaZaA

[UpnAtom]

Perhaps Kazaa's totals includes users you can't search and WinMX (Peer-to-Peer) doesn't?

/whois

[hlynna]

Imagine all the folks on EFnet with nicks from hell :)

And, hey imagine the netsplit! Good-Bye Atlanta!!

Re:/whois

[iamplasma]

EFnet doesn't have a nickserv bot AFAIK, so there's no real need to be stuck with a "nick from hell" because some loser who only comes on for 5 seconds a week has what you want registered (which is what happens for me on DALnet, my wanted nick is taken by a guy who genuinely spends about 10 seconds a week on DALnet, just long enough to keep the nick).

Re:/whois

[ramdac]

....thats why there are so many bots and not real users.

IRCnet is bigger

[erikdalen]

According to this statistics page, not only is IRCnet bigger than EFNet, but it also has had over 100,000 users for some time now.

/Erik

Re:IRCnet is bigger

[gl4ss]

stats as now.

network name, users, channels
1. IRCnet 113214 51643
2. QuakeNet 107036 105188
3. EFnet 92016 36885

Re:IRCnet is bigger

[ceeam]

The question is how much real are all these users?

Re:IRCnet is bigger

[swoopx]

This page says quakenet is the biggest, followed by undernet and then efnet.

Re:IRCnet is bigger

[hkmwbz]

Where does that site get its stats from? IRCnet is clearly bigger than EFnet in all the stats I've seen. Right now for IRCnet:

Current global users: 118890 Max: 119733

And EFnet:

Current global users: 98072 Max: 100239

But neither of these can claim to be the largest network anyway. Undernet? DALnet? QuakeNet?

100,000 Connections, but...

[EQ]

90,000 of them were warez, mp3 and chan-op war bots. ;-)

Re:100,000 Connections, but...

[Soul-Burn666]

You forgot something important: pr0n!

Re:100,000 Connections, but...

[evilviper]

No, actually it's all my fault. I was using GAIM's IRC plugin, recently ported as an alpha release for Windows. I was using a beta version of Perl for scripting, and everything went haywire for some strange reason. Suddenly, it just decided to open up 65,535 connections to EFnet... Boy that sucked... I mean, come on... how lowsy can open source software be?

It was already an alpha release, GAIM should have worked flawlessly, with less CPU power, and taking up less bandwidth than any other program on the planet.

What about Quakenet ?

[oPless]

www.quakenet.org

Currently Online: 109757
User Peak: 118855
(Sunday 15. September 2002)

Big Effin' woop.

100,000

[Kyeo]

DALnet's had that for a while.

Lotta warez

[YahoKa]

That is a looooot of warez being traded there!

IRCNet beat them before :)

[dimmu]

16:21 -!- There are 117737 users and 6 services on 44 servers
16:21 -!- 183 operators online
16:21 -!- 52481 channels formed
16:21 -!- I have 218 users, 0 services and 1 servers
16:21 -!- Current local users: 218 Max: 265
16:21 -!- Current global users: 117737 Max: 119275

Well that's a lot more then 100.000 isn't it ? :)

naw

[jjshoe]

50,000 were non manned cleints such as bots/bouncers etc. all the free *nix channels have been getting attacked by a script using wingates (psst *!~*1@*.* 2 3 4 etc etc)

Bots

[Aztek]

I wounder how many of those were bots from the opers

biggest channels..

[gl4ss]

as a reply to myself.
chan users irc-network
1.#ISO-XDCC 2143 zerolimit
2.#XDCC 1951 Criten
3.#WAREZ-CENTRAL 1382 Criten

gee, i wonder what people look up from IRC most of the time. fear not though, there's still hope:

teens is number 11.

grr. gotta use fewer junk characters! what are those anyways? lameness filter up my....

And you know what...

[rbruels]

...it was a Saturday night! 100,000 geeks without social lives, tonight on EFnet! :P

Re:And you know what...

[Timmeh]

It's sad but true. Last night I was on IRC and a net-buddy was bemoaning that there wasn't anyone on any of the CS/DoD servers he frequents, saying that it being a Saturday night the servers should be packed. I said, if we were normal people that would be totally backwards, we'd all be out on dates. But since we're geeks, yeah that sounds about right. Then my brother walked in and said something funny about how he could cook an egg on his overclocked Athlon, and I in response I said, "Lol," instead of chuckling.

Dear god I need to get out more. :P

Re:And you know what...

[ahodgson]

hehe glad I'm not the only one who has said "lol" out loud.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

IRC topics

[Bogatyr]

I wish I had the attribution for this quote, I didn't come up with it:
"I wandered over to the IRC channel I was looking for, and was disappointed that everyone there was ignoring the official topic, and talking about what everyone does on IRC - sex, d eath, and operating systems."Â

Re:IRC topics

[King_TJ]

You forgot "beer", the other unofficial IRC topic of choice.

what's with the 100,000 stories

[AX.25]

First it's the Linux kernel runs 100,000 concurrent threads. Now it's efnet has 100,000 concurrent users. What next, /.'s 100,000th concurrent story with a spelling error? :)

Clones

[zardie]

I had two clients connected, so they only got 99,999 connections.

How many were a floodbot network? On AUSTnet (an IRC network I admin a server on), we periodically get an increase of 400-500 clients if someone smart decides to play funny buggers...

Re:thank

[enneff]

[#bandwidth] Channel is full

haha.

Aftermath...

[SEWilco]

Amazingly, they just reached 100 connections while being Slashdotted...

Utter Rubbish

[RussGarrett]

EFNet ceased to be the largest IRC network months ago. DALNet is now the largest net on average, but it's had problems with DoSes recently, so currently IRCNet is in the lead with 113,000 users and 51,000 channels. QuakeNet is also regularly larger than EFNet, which usually resides at the number 3 or 4 spot. See http://irc.netsplit.de/networks/ for the latest statistics.

I wish editors would check their facts before posting random sumbissions

Re:Utter Rubbish

[fault0]

Actually, EFNet ceased to be the largest network in mid-2000. IRCnet was the first network to overtake it, but both Undernet, DALnet also eventually overtook EFnet later in 2000. IRCnet has been pretty much the largest network since then, except for this summer when DALnet jumped ahead of it. Now, DALnet has had lots of DOS problems, so IRCnet is a bit ahead again.

Recently, Quakenet has grown to the point where it is alternating between being second between itself and DALnet.

The IRC History charts at the website you mentioned are very good. I would recommend looking at these:

Top Ten IRC networks in 1999
Top Ten IRC networks in 2000
Top Ten IRC networks in 2001
Top Ten IRC networks so far in 2002

Re:Utter Rubbish

[RussGarrett]

Netsplit.de samples every 3 or 4 hours, so it has a tendency to miss large momentary spikes. It does, however, show the general relative sizes of the networks very well, and I haven't found a better source of information anywhere. IMO, their average table is the best showing of the size of networks, in which EFNet is 5th - http://irc.netsplit.de/networks/list1ua.var.

Re:Utter Rubbish

[pongo000]

This article, along with crap such as this and this, simply proves /. editors are out-of-touch with what is really going on in geekdom and what can truly pass as "news for nerds". It's almost as if /. has outlived itself, or maybe it's time for some fresh blood who have a clue.

I'm sure the /. groupies will mod this down in record time, but to you I say: Get a life, stop being a follower, and use the energy you would otherwise use to get into a snit and start pressuring the /. editors to bring us meaningful, timely content.

Re:Utter Rubbish

[Anonymous Coward]

Bravo for being sure you will get modded down for slamming the /. groupies, slamming them, and then getting modded up!

100 000

[Dakkus]

Now with linux 2.5 kernel you could give each ircer an own parallel thread in just two seconds.
Think about it!
And imagine a be.. Oh.. Nothing.. Well.. No!.. I won't say it, I won't, I won't! Won't I?

Re:100 000

[jaywee]

Unfortunately irc daemon can't be threaded in that way (you'd waste quit some time on locking). But yes, i think ircd is one of the few daemons which are almost 'pushing ip stack' to the limits - after all, having 40000 (twisted*.dal.net) connections in one process ain't that bad.

Re:100 000

[Dakkus]

Of course you'll write your own ircd to be able to give each ircer his/her own thread :)

Re:100 000

[jaywee]

Well, as an IRCnet ircd developer, i believe (as do EFnet/undernet coders), that making thread/user is really not the way to go (since IRC has to keep global state - therefore you need to lock here and there and in the result you waste more resources on locking than you'd think the benefit of threaded ircd is). JV

Re:100 000

[Dakkus]

ACtually I know absolutely nothing about threading. Not about it's good nor about it's bad sides

Slashdot does it again.

[KeyserDK]

Come on guys get your stories straight. This one was obvius.

Nice breaking a user record - Especially when EFNET is the 4th largest network. 100k Users was broken like a year ago - by IRCnet.

Check for yourself

Cant ever get on

[xWeston]

I can barely ever connect to efnet... irc.prison.net works sometimes as well as irc.east.gblx.net, other than that its a no-go

Top irc networks

[MnO-BF]

Stating that EFNet is the largest irc-network in the world may be to take the mouth a little too full. EFNet havent been number one since the summer 2000. The big four (IRCNet, Dalnet, Undernet and EFNet), were for a long time the largest networks in the world, but recently (30th of May, 2002) QuakeNet (a gaming related irc-network) broke in to the big four, and mingled with the big guys. Since then it has really been the big five, with current standing:

1. IRCNet
2. QuakeNet
3. DALnet
4. Undernet
5. EFNet

This is only regarding average users though, when it comes to channels QuakeNet takes a clear first position with over 100k channels, probably due to its special audience. As stated in previous posts, Netsplit is an excellent place to keep track of such statistics.

Re:Top irc networks

[Yarn]

As a fellow QuakeNet oper, I agree and also moo.

Let me proof-read your post next time tho' BF :)

Re:Top irc networks

[eyez]

It's worth mentioning that QuakeNet doesn't allow warez or piracy channels, while I'm pretty sure most of the other "big five" do. EFNet is in fact known for piracy. If they instituted such a policy, they'd drop to somewhere around 5k users, falling somewhere behind the feeble freenode (Which is a name laughed at by the big boys, who have about 15 times as many users, but ask for no donations of any kind, especially not $25k)

Re:Top irc networks

[Kashif Shaikh]

Even more funny are the top-10 channels from Netsplit:

channel users network

1. XDCC 2229 Criten
2. iso-xdcc 2206 zerolimit
3. WAREZ-CENTRAL 1575 Criten
4. CHRONIC-WAREZ 1294 Criten
5. tmd-moviez 1200 Criten
6. wareziso 1164 zerolimit
7. esu.sound 1139 QuakeNet
8. zurna 1116 ZurnaNet
9. baras 1038 Aitvaras
10. iso-vcd 990 zerolimit

make you own conclusions:)

Re:Top irc networks

[Pills]

Actually, netsplit.de is good and bad. Good in that the daily variations are good. Bad in that the *only* statistics that it uses are the *peak* daily user counts. Anyone with a shred of statistical knowlege can tell you that one reading per day is not statistically significant. The fact is that, based on the 8 daily readings on netsplit.de, the order is this (and has been for a few months): IRCnet DALnet EFnet Undernet Quakenet IRCnet and DALnet are close (average in the low 90s), EFnet has about 87k, Undernet's near 81k, and Quakenet is at 75k.

Re:Top irc networks

[Pills]

Grrr... goddamn formatting.

There is a project currently being worked on to take much more accurate statistics from the "Big 5". The fact is that DALnet and EFnet both retain their usercounts better during the whole day. The other three have peak times that give drastically higher user counts, which is what netsplit.de uses, and slow times, which are ignored.

Taking EFnet and Quakenet as examples, Quakenet's normal peak is roughly 20k more than EFnet's; however, Quakenet's slow period is roughly 30k users less than EFnet's. Normally, 5 of the 8 readings on netsplit.de have EFnet with a higher user count than Quakenet. Yet, Quakenet is #2 on their site, while EFnet is #5.

Ah, if only the Nick Delay/Time Stamp debate of '96 hadn't occured; this would be a moot point, as the original EFnet would likely have cleared 200k by this point.

Re:Top irc networks

[Pills]

IRCnet also has a very high ratio in .eu. I believe they have one server in North America.

Yes, it's logical how the population grows and dies on Quakenet, but using the peak usercount, as opposed to an average one to judge the size of a network, is not. EFnet averages 12k more users, and at times has 30k more. Quakenet, at times, has 20k more than EFnet. Take a look at netsplit.de's daily readings for the two networks, and you'll see what I mean.

In all seriousness

[SL33Z3]

In all seriousness -- trash-talking and flaiming aside -- who gives a sh*t?

Re:In all seriousness

[King_TJ]

Seriously, I do - to a small extent.
Why? Well, I've had a feeling that IRC is slowly dying off. The people just getting hooked on computers and using the Internet nowdays seem to prefer instant message clients like ICQ or AIM.

I used to spend a lot of time on EFNet, and later, Undernet - and got the impression that both were declining in actual usage. (Sure, they have tons of channels still - but many seem to just be file swapping channels with no actual discussion taking place in them.)

Just the fact that EFNet broke its own all-time usage records yesterday is interesting. I wouldn't have ever guessed it.

Re:In all seriousness

[MattBurke]

i was about to say the same thing myself :)

the only thing of mild interest within this thread is how the /. editors came up with the idea that 100k users makes an irc network the biggest... somebody please disagree with me, using logic which will make me think. please.

Re:In all seriousness

[SL33Z3]

Thanks for the rational reply to a very blunt question. That had to be the most mature response I've seen. Thanks for the reply and for not taking it as flaimbate.

I started using trillian instead of massive amounts of IM clients. I started using IRC again myself simply because it has the option to open up an connection to an IRC server.

I just didn't realize that it was big news to get 100K users on a server.

Thanks again for the info.

icrontic credits

[cr@ckwhore]

At the bottom of the page on icrontic, is the copyright notice... in particular ..

"Website Programmed by nsanity and jared, Designed by MethoD".

Probably not much programming going on there, because they're running PostNuke .721.

what happened

[mr100percent]

Was there something major that HAD to be talked about? Why that flood of traffic? A celebrity logged on, or Linus Torvalds doing a Q&A on EFNet?

Gee, it's been bigger guys...

[droopus]

On the weekend of May 9-11 2002 both Spiderman and SWEP2 were released on various IRC channels. The sudden rise in channel populations was staggering: on Dal, #Newest-Movies went from a usual 450ppl to 1300; #VCDvault went from 350 to 1000; all the movie channels on Dalnet, Efnet and the XDCC chans on Criten.net were massively overfilled.

On May 10 2002 Dalnet reached a level of 139000+ concurrent users.See chart

The usual population of all major and minor IRC networks is just under a million. But on that weekend it was almost double. Seeing Efnet hit 100k isn't anything special. There are bigger networks, and events that make 100k users on Efnet seem ordinary.

I can't believe you guys put this yawner on the front page but rejected my PS2 Networked Divx player story, or even worse, my ultra-cool Enron Asset Auction story, which every geek on IRC is slobbering over.

Re:Gee, it's been bigger guys...

[GigsVT]

That enron auction link rocks, thanks.

The thing is though, do you really want it Slashdotted? It will drive up the prices!

Dear CmdrTaco...

[iolaire_in_swe]

Are you on crack? :)

Yours sincerely

iolaire, QuakeNet operator

iolaire@quakenet.org

PS:
-Q(TheQBot@CServe.quakenet.org)- Currently Active Users: 113025
-Q(TheQBot@CServe.quakenet.org)- Max Active Users: 118905 (Sunday, 2002-09-15 19:00:36)

Re:Dear CmdrTaco...

[vekotin]

Iolaire-chan, I thought we agreed over there that we'd talk about such substances as "bananas".

Sure, this news isn't fact, but then again how many users still think of irc usage and networks as just "being on mirc"... this is close enough for me ;)

Please do *some* research before posting article

[huhmz]

Quakenet for example had 100k users several weeks ago and it's not even the largest network (although it is the largest network without all the bullshit netsplits every 4 minutes or so)

I guess EFnet isn't dying...

[EvilStein]

..but articles like this and this indicate otherwise.
Apparantly hitting 100,000 users is certainly not an IRC record. Is it just an EFnet specific record? Should it be "EFnet bounces back from the dead, hits 100,000 concurrent users once again!" or some other headline entirely?

How many users were DDoS bots/fserve bots/warez bots too? Were 9,000 of the users flood bots of some sort?

Oh well, I guess this just indicates that EFnet isn't nearly as dead as we thought it was.

how about an interview with Jarkko

[WH]

How about an interview with Jarkko? (he developed irc back in the 80's) I'd love to hear his thoughts on irc, how it has changed, and whether he still finds it useful.

given the number of trolls, bots, and so on...

[kipple]

...probably there are no more than a couple hundred users using IRC at the same time around the world. All the others are bots, fake, trolls, IA trying to understand the human beings, and so on...

So EF'n what!

[MsGeek]

When an IRC network gets that big, you can bet it's almost totally unusable. DALNet, EFNet, IRCNet...they are all WAY too big. I like the smaller networks. No I won't tell you where I chat, because dammit, this is /. and I don't want to see THEM get spoiled.

Woohoo. Way to go. Netsplits r us. Have fun staying connected, folks...

Re:So EF'n what!

[2MuchC0ffeeMan]

most useless comment ever.

that's like saying shopping at costco is useless, everyone should have mom and pop stores, not mega malls, and we should all be using small hard drives , you know, less than 512 kbs...

bigger is better, get used to it... if you like small networks, you can always develop a small channel on efnet.

Re:So EF'n what!

[SomeGuyFromCA]

Smaller networks are only better where your channel is a small, mostly static, group of regulars - if you rely on randoms popping in, sad to say, you won't get many on a smaller network.

Posted this anon on accident.

Re:AOL

[MoneyT]

23 users

)*&$)(&#(&*^(*#&^@*$^*&^@#*($^@*&# 20 second wait times.

Re:And you know what...Enterprise

[saskboy]

I wonder what percentage of those geeks were looking for the Enterprise season opener?

Re:Please do *some* research before posting articl

[CrackersnSoup]

Right untill the DDoS kiddies see your post

Crackers`n`Soup

DALnet does it with 1/2 the number of servers.

[Ballsy]

Perhaps also of note is the fact that DALnet reaches their 110-140K numbers with less than HALF the number of linked servers (22-26, versus 45-52 on IRCnet, EFnet and QuakeNet. See netsplit.de stats once again). At any rate, congratulations EFnet. It's certainly not a record, but still something to be proud of.

In Other News

[aelfwyne]

In Other News:

Newbie spotted actually using efnet to chat, however the channel bots slapped him down quickly enough and sitebanned him for speaking on channel.

Percentage of bots to users on efnet has reached an all time high: 105% bots and a negative number of users.

Must be a lot of one man clans in Quake

[xenocide2]

There's nearly 1 channel for every user on Quakenet!

Re:Must be a lot of one man clans in Quake

[Xenkar]

or maybe a lot of four member clans with #clan, #clan-private, #clan-trivia, and #clan-jukebox

Re:Must be a lot of one man clans in Quake

[Yarn]

It's due to our chanserv. There are a large number of channels which are empty except for the channel service bot for most of the time.

For details see our site

Enter The Game

[davew2040]

Sadly, the ETG IRC network probably set records by rejecting several dozens of thousands of hopeful connection attempts...

Damn those bitter script kiddies!

What a WASTE of resources!

[newestbob]

Imagine how much better the world would be if these 100,000 people, instead of flushing their time down the toilet chatting would:

• Do 1 hour volunteer work a day
• Practice the violin/piano/guitar 1 hour a day
• Read to their kids 1 hour a day
• Read a book 1 hour a day

As it is, they probably each spend 4-5 hours a day chatting with perverts, pedophiles, and pirates on IRC.

Re:What a WASTE of resources!

[droopus]

Priorities dude. What's important to you may not be important to others. You're like early Simpson's episodes where when the Internet was mentioned, Homer says "oh that's just for porn." I suspect you would disagree.

IRC is not all about piracy, and porn.

Think there are more than 100,000 people sitting in Laz-Z-Boys with a Miller, watching NASCAR right now? I suspect a lot more.

How about the people lying in hammocks thinking of how nice that cloud looks?

Or the 100,000 people riding lawn tractors, aerating their lawns?

How about the 100,000 crack dealers on the streets in Manhattan right now?

Yeah the world would be better if they all joined hands, emptied their pockets of cash to five to UNICEF, and sang "Kumbaya." But we live in the real world.

IRC is *community*, live and nasty. It's the best part of the net.

Reminds me of...

[Metallic Matty]

Reminds me of those crazy college contests where 25 drunk frat guys try and fit into a beetle...

"theres enough room for maybe 1,000 more users in this room here, if you squeeze!"

Re:Meanwhile, EnterTheGame is getting DoSed

[fault0]

just switch to something better than entertheanime.. like gamesnet, qnet, or pgp

CmdrTaco find a proxy :)

[Ilgaz]

poor CmdrTaco must have been g-lined from 3 other major networks...

Not a coincidence?

[Ed Avis]

I suppose they were launching one thread for each concurrent user?

How much of that is gnutella?

[bigberk]

Gnutella (and possibly other P2P networks) can use IRC as a meeting point, to swap IP addresses on a very large scale. I wonder how many of those IRC connections were related to gnutella?

What about bots ?

[billcopc]

This is all nice and good, but what about the zillions of bots on there ? I could open up my own IRC server, spawn flood bots and wait for my box to run out of swap space.. then I'd surely bust the 100k connection cap.

Still, it's nice to know there are 98000 twelve-year olds littering that IRC network. I haven't irc'ed in years because of that social pollution.

Counting users

[jesser]

Networks without nick and channel registration tend to have inflated user counts due to people staying on all the time to guard their nicks and creating bots to guard channels. Which networks currently have nick and channel registration? Is it possible to get a count of users with idle time under 30 minutes, thus excluding most idle users and some bots?

Re:Counting users

[Yarn]

Not trivial. The idle time is only known to the server that the user resides upon.

Re:did efnet and ircnet relink?

[Yarn]

Think about the hassle when the existing channels remerged. Who would get to keep ops?

Anyone think it's a coincidence

[interstellar_donkey]

That to find out this information, somebody had to type /lusers over and over again?

In the meantime, I suppose I'm supposed to feel good that I was idling through a small peice of history.

Surprised?

[gad_zuki!]

I felt a disturbance in the net, like 100,000 voices all screamed, "DID U S33 FIREFLY?!?!" at once.

There's nothing interesting about this...

[fishnuts]

The luser count went from 96000 to 98500, back down to 97000 and up to 101,400 within 30 minutes. There's nothing "special" about this record when it was broken by kiddies just loading up a bunch of drone nets.

As an efnet oper, I see the drone nets (consisting of both open proxy abusers as well as trojanned windows systems) connect and reconnect every day. They make up AT LEAST 20% of our total user base. Many of them are conveniently disguised as XDCC fileserver bots to keep the opers from indiscriminately killing them.

So as far as I'm concerned, we still haven't broken 80,000 _users_.

EFnet is not the largest

[XO]

EFnet has also struck 100,000 concurrent connections many times. THis is apparently just the first time anybody actually NOTICEd because I bet that 99,997 of those "concurrent connections" were robots, and/or "idle 7 days 21 hrs 36 min" .

IRCnet is the largest.

EFnet was just the first.

Meanwhile...

[PurpleBob]

50,000 of those users had a minute and a half of lag.

30,000 were in the middle of the connect process, waiting for identd to time out, because identd never works and their client wasn't l33t enough to give the necessary fake responses.

The other 20,000 had a netsplit immediately after they counted.

Yay for way-too-big IRC networks.

Our thank yous...

[SamMichaels]

We should take this time to send a special thank you to all the clones and bots that made 100,000 connections possible :)

Re:Bah...this isn't news.

[ScUmM_BoY]

d00ds, Bring it!

All I can say is...

[dissonant7]

...HAIL ERIS! (-;

(if you know what the EF in EFnet stands for, you know this isn't a troll)

How about an on-line game?

[lanzer]

Was playing Ragnarok beta last month, and simultaneous on-line users reached 9800 at peak hours. Needless to say there were some lag. :) The Korean creators of the game had released for pay to play recently and grossed 30 million the first week. Now let's see what the Japanese, Chinese, Thai, and English versions will gross...

realtime irc concurrent user stats

[tangent3]

Just checked out http://irc.netsplit.de/networks/, and the present concurrent users are as follows:

network users channels

1. Undernet 93362 39010
2. EFnet 91815 36570
3. IRCnet 86006 47850
4. QuakeNet 56567 96825
5. BRASnet 41473 12545
6. GamesNET 25574 22348
7. BrasIRC 12669 4531
8. WebChat 12008 6508
9. IRC-Hispano 10900 14986
10. GalaxyNet 9617 13572

EFnet the top IRC network? Naaaaaaaah

Re:Everquest...

[3vi1]

I think his point was, since you can do /tell's between all users/servers in EQ, it's also a bigger chat 'forum' than EFNET.

Just great.....

[cyberdog6]

100,000 snotty, wise-ass 12 -15 year old pimply teenagers. man, i'm sold.

i stopped going to EFnet to avoid those RTFMing dateless wonders, and i'm not going back just because there are more of them.

if you have knowledge, share it. otherwise, you render it meaningless.

Last Post!

[alpg]

"I quite agree with you," said the Duchess; "and the moral of
that is -- `Be what you would seem to be' -- or, if you'd like it put
more simply -- `Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it
might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not
otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be
otherwise.'"
-- Lewis Carrol, "Alice in Wonderland"

- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...