Despite being a private community of music fanatics, What.cd operates one of the largest BitTorrent trackers on the Internet. Recently, the site’s users were silently transferred to a new tracker. Named Ocelot, the new and improved tracker is one of the most efficient around and to commemorate its implementation What.cd staff have been telling the complete story of how it came to be.
With nearly a million torrents featuring a massive 343,203 artists, What.cd is without a doubt the largest private BitTorrent tracker dedicated to sharing music. At any given point in time more than 5 million peers are using the site’s tracker, making it one of the busiest on the entire Internet. What.cd first appeared online in the fall of 2007, just days after the demise of the largest music tracker at the time, OiNK. The site’s founders felt that the OiNK refugees deserved a new home, and decided to fill the void the Pink Palace had left. In the three years that followed, What.cd outgrew its predecessor by a wide margin and slowly turned into a legend itself.
Today, the tracker receives an average of 3,500 hits per second, which is a demanding task for the site’s hardware and software. Up until a few weeks ago What.cd used the XBTT backend, which handled the traffic really well in the early years, but as the site grew problems started to appear more frequently.
To customize the XBTT backend to the needs of the growing site, back in the winter of 2007 What’s developers delved deep into the core of the code. Some adjustments were made, but at the same time the developers realized that XBTT’s code wasn’t perfect. Perhaps just as importantly, it was not something of their own.
What.cd needed its own tracker backend, so just as they had replaced the original TBDev source with their own Gazelle code, XBTT needed to have a successor.
The story that unfolded after the What team decided to build their own tracker is a unique saga. A long and winding development process of nearly three years eventually resulted in the ‘Ocelot’ tracker that went live on What.cd a few weeks ago. Not without result.
Today, What.cd has one of, if not the most efficient and lightweight tracker there is. On What.cd Ocelot uses only 20%-30% of one CPU core and 3GB of RAM, compared to the four instances of XBTT that were using up 50%-100% CPU before. In the future the tracker’s code will be open sources so other BitTorrent communities can benefit from it as well.
To document this milestone the What.cd has written a long article on how Ocelot was born, what decisions were made along the way, and why it took so much time to complete. A great read for those who are interested in learning more background information on one of the largest private BitTorrent communities that exists today.
The complete story behind Ocelot, as posted on What.cd by the site’s staff, can be read below.
Source: http://torrentfreak.com/what-cd-debuts-lightweight-tracker-for-its-5-million-peers-101014/
With nearly a million torrents featuring a massive 343,203 artists, What.cd is without a doubt the largest private BitTorrent tracker dedicated to sharing music. At any given point in time more than 5 million peers are using the site’s tracker, making it one of the busiest on the entire Internet. What.cd first appeared online in the fall of 2007, just days after the demise of the largest music tracker at the time, OiNK. The site’s founders felt that the OiNK refugees deserved a new home, and decided to fill the void the Pink Palace had left. In the three years that followed, What.cd outgrew its predecessor by a wide margin and slowly turned into a legend itself.
Today, the tracker receives an average of 3,500 hits per second, which is a demanding task for the site’s hardware and software. Up until a few weeks ago What.cd used the XBTT backend, which handled the traffic really well in the early years, but as the site grew problems started to appear more frequently.
To customize the XBTT backend to the needs of the growing site, back in the winter of 2007 What’s developers delved deep into the core of the code. Some adjustments were made, but at the same time the developers realized that XBTT’s code wasn’t perfect. Perhaps just as importantly, it was not something of their own.
What.cd needed its own tracker backend, so just as they had replaced the original TBDev source with their own Gazelle code, XBTT needed to have a successor.
The story that unfolded after the What team decided to build their own tracker is a unique saga. A long and winding development process of nearly three years eventually resulted in the ‘Ocelot’ tracker that went live on What.cd a few weeks ago. Not without result.
Today, What.cd has one of, if not the most efficient and lightweight tracker there is. On What.cd Ocelot uses only 20%-30% of one CPU core and 3GB of RAM, compared to the four instances of XBTT that were using up 50%-100% CPU before. In the future the tracker’s code will be open sources so other BitTorrent communities can benefit from it as well.
To document this milestone the What.cd has written a long article on how Ocelot was born, what decisions were made along the way, and why it took so much time to complete. A great read for those who are interested in learning more background information on one of the largest private BitTorrent communities that exists today.
The complete story behind Ocelot, as posted on What.cd by the site’s staff, can be read below.
Source: http://torrentfreak.com/what-cd-debuts-lightweight-tracker-for-its-5-million-peers-101014/