BitTorrent Demonii Tracker Comes Back to Life
Demonii was in 2015 the Most important BitTorrent trackers of P2P networks. The Demonoid-inspired service handled requests from more than 50 million peers, some two billion daily connections. But the fall from grace of the group that operated it, YTS, following the MPA lawsuit, ended his reign. He now he just came back to life, as we read in TorrentFreak.
Trackers are a crucial part of the BitTorrent infrastructure and file-sharing networks in general by making it easy for downloaders and uploaders to connect with each other. In essence, they improve content sharing and are used by torrent sites. Technically speaking, trackers are similar to a DNS provider, they work like a “phone book” that pinpoints content.
Demonii’s return has come quite unexpectedly for most torrent users, but those who keep a close eye on the tracker’s connections will have noticed. It turns out that many active torrents still have Demonii on the tracker list and back in action coordinating the transfers of over four million pairs. These millions of torrent users connect to almost two million older torrents that were also active before the tracker shutdown.
‘Suni’, a veteran of the BitTorrent scene and operator of smaller sites, is behind the comeback. «The tracker served a purpose. While many may argue that the loss of Demonii in 2015 wasn’t a huge deal for the ecosystem, it actually was; it was one of the most reliable torrent trackers in the world”Suni explains.
Demonii, like the original, runs on OpenTracker software, which is relatively lightweight. The tracker is currently hosted on two virtual machines running Debian 11 from docker containers. The tracker supports IPv4 and IPv6 connections and handles around 300,000 active requests per minute. It must be said that this tracker does not generate any income to its operator and does not host any type of content.
Certainly BitTorrent has lost users to alternatives like streaming and once bandwidth costs have dropped dramatically. However, it is still a protocol used daily by tens of millions of users. Of course, beyond the pirated content that certainly moves on P2P networks, BitTorrent is as legal as any other application or protocol and is a very useful alternative to the server-based distribution system. Or streaming.
For example, it is widely used to distribute GNU-Linux distributions and by large organizations such as Google, Facebook or NASA. Another example is OpenStreetMap, which offers torrent channels to download updated versions of its maps and, in addition to files, has other uses such as VoIP applications. Legal torrents also exist and move more content than you can imagine. Trackers are key.
