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

Not necessarily good...

[David Price]

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

I sure hope they fixed them all afterward.

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.

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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[richie2000]

WOOT! I'm NOT alone! ;-)

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

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

[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. :)

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

[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...

[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.

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

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.

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...

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

[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.

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

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:dang

[Jelque]

And you thought Efnet was dead or dying.

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.

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.

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: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.

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: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?

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.

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

[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

Re:Meanwhile, EnterTheGame is getting DoSed

[fault0]

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

Not a coincidence?

[Ed Avis]

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

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.

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 :)

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