July 13, 2004

4:26 PM

A few questions for anyone who has set up/administered a torrent tracker: Is running a tracker gonna take lots of bandwidth and/or server cpu cycles? Are some trackers more efficient in these respects than others? Whats the best open-source PHP tracker? Answers and any other caveats much appreciated.
posted by Fupped Duck to (2 comments total)

Is running a tracker gonna take lots of bandwidth and/or server cpu cycles?

not really, but depends on how fancy it is, and how much torrents/users you will have. if you plan to do the seeding yourself, that will also be a consideration.

basically the bandwidth and cpu cycles will come much more from the tracker website than the tracker itself, which is minimal.

Are some trackers more efficient in these respects than others?

the less complex it is, generally the more efficient it is. I use the plain-vanilla tracker that comes with bittornado, and allow the torrent files to be downloadable from its autogenerated web page -- the most basic operation, but it works and even the web portion takes up little cpu.

if you do plan to seed, check out something that has a super-seed mode (again e.g. bittornado) -- this will let you seed with much less impact on prcs bndwdth, and, by the same token, cpu.

haven't bothered with any of the php ones, sorry.
posted by dorian at 4:58 PM on July 13, 2004

I use PHPBTTracker for my tracker. If you don't seed files locally, it doesn't take much bandwidth at all... Mostly, it's just MySQL calls.
posted by waxpancake at 5:11 PM on July 13, 2004