Demonii Tracker Tops 30 Million Connected Peers

An anonymous reader writes Demonii is the tracker behind the scenes for many BitTorrent sites serving pirated content. This week the tracker broke through the barrier of 30 million connected peers, handling no less than 2 billion connections per day. In other words, the scale of operation has become massive. TorrentFreak interviewed an operator of the site, and it was revealed that the tracker runs smoothly on just three dedicated servers, communicating at 180 Mb/s while serving 4 million torrents. Some people have argued that trackers are obsolete in the first place, as DHT and PEX allow peers to share the same information among each other, but Demonii's operator reminds that having trackers speeds up the initial peer finding significantly. In any case, Demonii is not going away anytime soon. The tracker is already on its way to another milestone. The 40 million peer milestone will probably come into view later this year, but first there are a trillion more connections to process.

Comments

DHT

[Anonymous Coward]

DHT is a nice concept but has one disadvantage: YouHaveDownloaded.com

Re:DHT

[Nutria]

only metadata

Famous last words...

theres a reason they call them trackers.

[nimbius]

Althought here is an efficiency increase, the reason most torrent users consider them obsolete is the ability for third parties to discern who has downloaded a specific file or torrent. Given the propensity for american media cartels to levy disproportionately heavy lawswuits for content, sometimes in the billions or trillions of US dollars, most people use magnet links.

I would be very suspicious of a new tracker thats gained in popularity using a technology that could widely be used to dragnet its userbase into lengthy and costly court proceedings. Especially after the recent pirate bay sting site.

Re:theres a reason they call them trackers.

[Kjella]

Uh, you do realize that if you launch a magnet link the first thing it'll do is download the torrent and connect to any trackers listed in it to find more peers, unless you've really gone out of your way to disable it you still use them. Not to mention that DHT broadcasts it out loud to everybody....

Re:theres a reason they call them trackers.

[jones_supa]

Given the propensity for american media cartels to levy disproportionately heavy lawswuits for content, sometimes in the billions or trillions of US dollars, most people use magnet links.

Take a look at a Magnet link, it has a list of trackers right in the URL.

"not going away anytime soon"

[Arancaytar]

That's pretty optimistic for a centralized site that seems to do exactly what the Pirate Bay got shut down for...

Re:"not going away anytime soon"

[jones_supa]

Hard to prove, but still good thinking. Just tapping the handful of big trackers would indeed give NSA quite nice eagle-eye view of what's happening in torrent traffic.

I love it.

[dohzer]

I love it when values equal or exceed the number 2,000,000,000, thereby allowing them to be officially recognised by the International Organisation for Large Things (IOLT) as "massive".

Commercials of Operating a Tracker

[Finn61]

Legitimate question and sorry, I didn't RTFA, but was wondering how do you fund an operation such as this? I guess you can't serve ads as no-one 'browses' your web page. Someone must pay for the 180Mb/s bandwidth, and the servers. There are clearly costs involved but I can't see how any of those costs get recovered. I've often wondered the same thing with NZB indexes (the open ones), or other services that you can use freely without ad serving.