any private trackers with large swarms?

For a long time I have been curious about the famous download speeds possible with private BT trackers. This morning I had my chance. Demonoid was doing site maintenance and it seems they had their login disabled. I was able to browse and download for an hour or two. What I found shocked me. Nearly all the swarms were tiny. Usually less than 20 and often less than 10 seeds+peers. I thought that, unless the folks from private trackers had unusually high upload speeds, that that might mean slow download speeds. I was right. Most torrents downloaded at less than 100KB/s. The fastest torrent I could find would vary between 200KB/s and 400KB/s. On TPB, unless a torrent is really rare and/or old I generally expect and get downloads faster than 1 MB/s and often can manage 2-3 MB/s for a single torrent.

In addition it seemed that most of the high-def movies were 4 gigs or smaller. I found that 8 gig 1080p files were much more difficult to find than on TPB. I assume that just means that demonoid culture prefers more highly compressed files.

Of course Demonoid is an old tracker and it doesn't enforce ratios. So maybe a lot of people have left for greener pastures making the site a bit like an abandoned ghost town with tumbleweed blowing down the main street. But I am concerned that none of the private trackers are much better in terms of average swarm size. This seems like it could be a major problem with private trackers, and I haven't heard it discussed before.

Are there any private trackers where the average swarm size is at least in the hundreds and where popular torrents have swarms that make it into the thousands? I think the BT protocol really relies on a certain minimum swarm size to work effectively.

TL and scc have the biggest swarms and the best speeds :)

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any private trackers with large swarms?

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Many :yup: TorrentLeech, IPT, BitSoup, Zamunda, Filelist.ro, Rutracker...

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Originally Posted by karachidude

TL and scc

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SCC's swarms aren't even close to those of the names I mentioned :happy:

Are we taking bees or wasps because I've found that while bees are more persistent wasps are more likely to do the greater damage.

It all depends on the upload speed of the people in the swarm. I've gotten plenty of speed out of swarms with 2-10 people in them, maxing out my downstream easily. Demonoid isn't the best example of private tracker speeds, I wouldn't even call them private.... For general stuff, as mentioned, check out torrentleech. Easy to get into and big swarms with lots of speed for all.

Torrent leech is recommended

Tl & IPT have the fastest speeds in my opinion, I like SCC but its hard to build a ratio also it really depends on the speed of the seed boxes and how many users are downloading/uploading from seed boxes. Demonoid is not really the best example of a private site they are classed as "semi private" and there ratio system is a joke.

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Originally Posted by IdolEyes787

Are we taking bees or wasps because I've found that while bees are more persistent wasps are more likely to do the greater damage.

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Not certain about quantity but for sheer acreage 'covered', I have to go with locusts.

Yeah, yeah, I know. :shutup: Aristocles!

Thanks for all the replies. Just what I was looking for. Much appreciated. I'm a complete newbie when it comes to private trackers though. I don't understand most of the acronyms. Is there a list somewhere that gives the full names for each acronym? I get that TorrentLeech = TL, but as for the rest: TI, IPT, SCC. No clue.

I find the idea that TorrentLeech is easy to get into kind of funny. As far as I can tell all of the closed private trackers seem to be nearly impossible to get into. Even Demonoid seems nearly impossible if I don't actually buy an invite. You have to know someone, and I don't. I was asking just out of a more theoretical curiosity than a practical one. I don't expect to ever have a chance to get into any of these. I suppose I could try to pay someone for an invite, but from what I have seen that is considered uber-bad in the community. If I ever got caught I'd get permabanned. I guess I'll just have to stick with TPB. The whole closed tracker thing seems kind of wasteful to me though. I have a 35/35 mbit FIOS connection. I could really be contributing a lot of upload bandwidth to the private tracker swarms, but I can't get in because of the closed communities.

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Originally Posted by gojirasan

Thanks for all the replies. Just what I was looking for. Much appreciated. I'm a complete newbie when it comes to private trackers though. I don't understand most of the acronyms. Is there a list somewhere that gives the full names for each acronym? I get that TorrentLeech = TL, but as for the rest: TI, IPT, SCC. No clue.

I find the idea that TorrentLeech is easy to get into kind of funny. As far as I can tell all of the closed private trackers seem to be nearly impossible to get into. Even Demonoid seems nearly impossible if I don't actually buy an invite. You have to know someone, and I don't. I was asking just out of a more theoretical curiosity than a practical one. I don't expect to ever have a chance to get into any of these. I suppose I could try to pay someone for an invite, but from what I have seen that is considered uber-bad in the community. If I ever got caught I'd get permabanned. I guess I'll just have to stick with TPB. The whole closed tracker thing seems kind of wasteful to me though. I have a 35/35 mbit FIOS connection. I could really be contributing a lot of upload bandwidth to the private tracker swarms, but I can't get in because of the closed communities.

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I ALWAYS have IPT (IPTorrents) invites laying around. once you get the 15 posts required (I think it's 15) for PM privileges PM you and I could give you one.

IPT usually has swarm sizes similar to TorrentLeech from what I have seen, but the swarm diminishes faster. TI I can't recall what it means right now... and SCC has strict rules about no actually saying the name of the tacker, and I try to respect all tracker rules so you'll have to get someone else to post.

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Originally Posted by anon-sbi

Many :yup: TorrentLeech, IPT, BitSoup, Zamunda, Filelist.ro, Rutracker...

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Originally Posted by karachidude

TL and scc

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SCC's swarms aren't even close to those of the names I mentioned :happy:

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Everything he said plus arenabg. Also there are sites like lastorrents which is open at the moment and the swarms there are fairly big.

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Originally Posted by gojirasan

I don't understand most of the acronyms. Is there a list somewhere that gives the full names for each acronym? I get that TorrentLeech = TL, but as for the rest: TI, IPT, SCC. No clue.

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There's no TI tracker, you must have confused the lowercase L for an I. TL is indeed TorrentLeech, IPT is IPTorrents, and SCC is SceneAccess.

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I find the idea that TorrentLeech is easy to get into kind of funny. As far as I can tell all of the closed private trackers seem to be nearly impossible to get into.

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I thought the same when I was totally new to private trackers, but it's not that hard.

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Even Demonoid seems nearly impossible if I don't actually buy an invite. You have to know someone, and I don't.

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Don't buy invites. It's stupid to pay for something you can eventually get "for free", none of the money you give goes towards the tracker, and the trend with invite sellers nowadays is banning them and their whole invite tree if caught, and that'd include you.

In Demonoid's case, invite codes are insanely easy to get, and they even open registrations relatively frequently. You can't consider it a private tracker, though, since it's possible to download torrents without being registered.

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I could really be contributing a lot of upload bandwidth to the private tracker swarms, but I can't get in because of the closed communities.

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There are many sites open for registrations, monitor the open signups thread here. Others, while being invite-only, are easy to get in if you post a request or apply on a giveaway here once yoy get your privileges. :)

Don't fall for seeing trading as the way to get in trackers, it's forbidden by 99 if not 100% of them.

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Originally Posted by gojirasan

Thanks for all the replies. Just what I was looking for. Much appreciated. I'm a complete newbie when it comes to private trackers though. I don't understand most of the acronyms. Is there a list somewhere that gives the full names for each acronym? I get that TorrentLeech = TL, but as for the rest: TI, IPT, SCC. No clue.

I find the idea that TorrentLeech is easy to get into kind of funny. As far as I can tell all of the closed private trackers seem to be nearly impossible to get into. Even Demonoid seems nearly impossible if I don't actually buy an invite. You have to know someone, and I don't. I was asking just out of a more theoretical curiosity than a practical one. I don't expect to ever have a chance to get into any of these. I suppose I could try to pay someone for an invite, but from what I have seen that is considered uber-bad in the community. If I ever got caught I'd get permabanned. I guess I'll just have to stick with TPB. The whole closed tracker thing seems kind of wasteful to me though. I have a 35/35 mbit FIOS connection. I could really be contributing a lot of upload bandwidth to the private tracker swarms, but I can't get in because of the closed communities.

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Reiteration, but nevertheless. . .

[The below presupposes that you have read the forums for a bit]

Stick around here and post occasionally but at least somewhat regularly. (Not meaningless tripe but something you think- not feel- adds to the topic.) Two posts since January seems a bit on the low side for this type of forum. The diversity of topics here- albeit falling under a 'specific' rubric- is significant enough to provide you with an area in which you can contribute.

Go to the open signup area and work your way through some posts; then go to some of the links and sign up, using your best judgment (or judgement). Some will work others will not. Bow out of the ones that fit and keep the ones that are useful.

After chiming in for a bit, you can make a request for a given invite. In the request, it is likely necessary to include why you want the specified tracker invitation and what you will contribute to the tracker and (if applicable) have contributed to other trackers. Possibly other questions. It seems to me that passing out invites is a sort of wager by the inviter on the invitee; as they can reflect upon the inviter.

If the above goes well and you find a few good sites via the 'open signup' and do right by that/those place/s, then getting an invite to another site by requesting it should be somewhat hassle free.

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Originally Posted by gojirasan

Thanks for all the replies. Just what I was looking for. Much appreciated. I'm a complete newbie when it comes to private trackers though. I don't understand most of the acronyms. Is there a list somewhere that gives the full names for each acronym? I get that TorrentLeech = TL, but as for the rest: TI, IPT, SCC. No clue.

I find the idea that TorrentLeech is easy to get into kind of funny. As far as I can tell all of the closed private trackers seem to be nearly impossible to get into. Even Demonoid seems nearly impossible if I don't actually buy an invite. You have to know someone, and I don't. I was asking just out of a more theoretical curiosity than a practical one. I don't expect to ever have a chance to get into any of these. I suppose I could try to pay someone for an invite, but from what I have seen that is considered uber-bad in the community. If I ever got caught I'd get permabanned. I guess I'll just have to stick with TPB. The whole closed tracker thing seems kind of wasteful to me though. I have a 35/35 mbit FIOS connection. I could really be contributing a lot of upload bandwidth to the private tracker swarms, but I can't get in because of the closed communities.

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I agree. I keep hearing that tl and ipt are great trackers for newbies, but, it is hard to get invites. As far as the tracker abbreviations, I could use some help with those also.Thanks.:yup:

ipt must be tracker with biger swarm i know. torrentday also great to test.

Well the swarm may not always matter!!

Because a public tracker torrent may have a huge swarm, who are very bad users provided low retention and slow up!!

So sometimes in private tracker, good users uppinf at average speeds
or users seeding from 100 Mbit or 1 Gbit box provides much better speeds and retention (combined the two I mentioned!!)

PS: Still in terms of Private tracker world OPT has huge user base any very good swarm associated to each torrent!!

Also it doesnt matter how many is in the swarm, you can only connect to so many of them, My client is set to 50 peers per torrent (obviously you can increase this, but increase it into the 100`s and your OS will have a heart attack.)

so 10 seedbox seeders, and 30 leechers, the 30 leechers will probably max their connections out.

1000 seeders and 30 leechers, you more than likely wont especially on a public tracker, as those leechers can only get stuff off 50 each, and if those 50 each are uploaing at 1KBs, then the max you can download is 50KBs.

Like the member above me said, it depends who is on the torrent, and who you can connect to at the time.

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Originally Posted by PancakeWaffles

I ALWAYS have IPT (IPTorrents) invites laying around. once you get the 15 posts required (I think it's 15) for PM privileges PM you and I could give you one.

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That would be really nice of you. Thanks for the offer. But why would you do that? Don't you have to trust someone to give them an invite? If I were to get myself in trouble with the tracker wouldn't your own membership be in jeopardy? I guess the whole point of the invite only system is to keep the whole community "trusted", but it also means that the community is very inclusive. I assumed that invites would only go to actual friends in IRL. And ones that you really trust at that. Those sorts of systems are usually intended to keep out "the man", aka RIAA/MPAA spies etc. I get the impression though that with private trackers there are other goals as well.

I've seen people invite begging on various forums and it always seems a bit cheeky to me. After all, you are asking for someone to trust their membership to you. It just so happens that I am strictly a 1:1+ ratio kind of guy. I always was even back on Emule and Edonkey2000 before that. I have always felt that I should give back to the swarm at least as much bandwidth as I take. It only seemed fair. And of course with my 35/35 symmetric connection it is ridiculously easy to get 1:1 or greater at least on a public tracker. Still you have no way of knowing if I am telling the truth. Although I'm not really sure why a leecher would want to join a private tracker in the first place unless they were planning on using a ratio faker program or something and I've heard that the trackers are getting better at detecting those.

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Originally Posted by stoi

Also it doesnt matter how many is in the swarm, you can only connect to so many of them, My client is set to 50 peers per torrent (obviously you can increase this, but increase it into the 100`s and your OS will have a heart attack.)

so 10 seedbox seeders, and 30 leechers, the 30 leechers will probably max their connections out.

1000 seeders and 30 leechers, you more than likely wont especially on a public tracker, as those leechers can only get stuff off 50 each, and if those 50 each are uploaing at 1KBs, then the max you can download is 50KBs.

Like the member above me said, it depends who is on the torrent, and who you can connect to at the time.

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Well I do somewhat agree with you in theory. It is only the people in the swarm that you are actually connected to at any given time that matter. I am just going from experience (almost exclusively on public trackers). In my experience 9 times out of 10 a larger number of seeds+peers (total number of clients in the swarm) correlates to faster download (and upload) speeds. Typically I find that I end up connecting to somewhere between 200 and 300 seeders and leechers in the average swarm which is big enough to support it. Even if the swarm has 5000 BT clients in it, it is not like I can connect to all of them. It's kind of frustrating actually because I don't understand why I can't connect to more clients.

Of course there is the popular idea that only the number of seeds matter. In my experience this simply is not (always) true. Although it may be true if you don't have a high upload speed or if it is a small swarm. Sometimes I will download 2 or 3 equivalent torrents on TPB and compare the download speeds and see how it correlates to the seed:peer stats. Let's say there is a 500:500 seed/peer swarm and a 500:1000 seed/peer swarm. Most people would probably go for the 500:500 swarm, but I would expect the 500:1000 swarm to actually perform better for me. My theory is that I am leveraging my high upload speed to benefit from the tit-for-tat part of the bittorrent algorithm in order to receive higher download speeds, but this only works for peers. Seeds don't care about how much upload bandwidth I contribute back to the swarm (unless they are superseeding). Also, I think the number of seeds is actually less important than the total number of complete copies of the file in the swarm. Sometimes the 500:1000 swarm will have more complete copies in it than the 500:500 swarm.

BTW, my download speeds increased by an order of magnitude when I finally tweaked the Windows XP Max Connections field to allow for 12000 connections instead of just 256 or whatever it is in SP3. But, yeah the OS can limit you as can a router if you use one. That is why I don't use a router.

As to why a larger swarm seems to mean faster speeds for me above the number of clients I can connect to I am not sure. There must be some explanation, but I don't have one. I just do what works (on public trackers).

Private trackers with strictly enforced ratios can be a very different can of worms. No longer does the community really rely on the tit-for-tat aspect of Bittorrent for fairness. In my limited ratio enforced private tracker experience (an open porn tracker that I am a member of) even a swarm with less than 10 clients can max out my connection. I think this is because there seem to be enough seeders just "camping out" on the torrent waiting to improve their ratios. Obviously when there are 20 seeders and you are the only leech and their purpose is to upload enough to improve their ratio stats your download is going to haul ass. And often it only takes 3-5 seeders or only 1 seeder like me who has high upload bandwidth.

But to me that situation seems kind of abnormal. I guess it is due to what P2P theorists refer to as the BT "credit crunch", where there seems to be a surplus of upload bandwidth and not enough downloaders to absorb it. A rather strange situation to someone used to public trackers or other p2p systems. One particularly nice thing about it (aside from maxing your downstream connection) is that it can serve to dramatically increase retention. Something that has always been the achilles heel for bittorrent. To this day I still can only find certain rare files on Emule, although they may take literally months to get even for a 700 meg divx movie file or 650 meg game CD.

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Originally Posted by gojirasan

That would be really nice of you. Thanks for the offer. But why would you do that? Don't you have to trust someone to give them an invite?

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Looks like he trusts you enough. :P

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Even if the swarm has 5000 BT clients in it, it is not like I can connect to all of them. It's kind of frustrating actually because I don't understand why I can't connect to more clients.

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You can if you set your client's maximum amount of connections to a ridiculously high amount, but you'll then have to deal with extra overhead, which will slow "real" downloads down.

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Originally Posted by anon-sbi

You can if you set your client's maximum amount of connections to a ridiculously high amount, but you'll then have to deal with extra overhead, which will slow "real" downloads down.

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My global max connections (in utorrent) is already set to 10000. Connected peers per torrent is 600, and upload slots per torrent is 30.

I recently had the chance to compare a 2000/10000 seed:peer swarm to a 1000/2000 seed:peer swarm. The 1000:2000 swarm maxed out my connection (~4.3MB/sec). With the 2000/10000 swarm my average speed was around 400 KB/sec with a max around 500 KB/sec). So I guess there is a point at which seed:peer ratio starts to reduce download speeds.

I joined a private tracker from the open tracker list, but I was again disappointed with the download speeds. The torrents were small. Usually less than 10 in the swarm. So far TPB has beat it every time when the same files were available. It did have some rare files that I couldn't find on TPB or btjunkie though.

10000 max connections,600 per torrent seems way to high. Even using public trackers. Do you have dht enabled when you are downloading from public bt sites?

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Originally Posted by gojirasan

My global max connections (in utorrent) is already set to 10000. Connected peers per torrent is 600, and upload slots per torrent is 30.

I recently had the chance to compare a 2000/10000 seed:peer swarm to a 1000/2000 seed:peer swarm. The 1000:2000 swarm maxed out my connection (~4.3MB/sec). With the 2000/10000 swarm my average speed was around 400 KB/sec with a max around 500 KB/sec). So I guess there is a point at which seed:peer ratio starts to reduce download speeds.

I joined a private tracker from the open tracker list, but I was again disappointed with the download speeds. The torrents were small. Usually less than 10 in the swarm. So far TPB has beat it every time when the same files were available. It did have some rare files that I couldn't find on TPB or btjunkie though.

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Why is it too high? I do have DHT enabled.

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Originally Posted by gojirasan

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Originally Posted by anon-sbi

You can if you set your client's maximum amount of connections to a ridiculously high amount, but you'll then have to deal with extra overhead, which will slow "real" downloads down.

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My global max connections (in utorrent) is already set to 10000. Connected peers per torrent is 600, and upload slots per torrent is 30.

I recently had the chance to compare a 2000/10000 seed:peer swarm to a 1000/2000 seed:peer swarm. The 1000:2000 swarm maxed out my connection (~4.3MB/sec). With the 2000/10000 swarm my average speed was around 400 KB/sec with a max around 500 KB/sec). So I guess there is a point at which seed:peer ratio starts to reduce download speeds.

I joined a private tracker from the open tracker list, but I was again disappointed with the download speeds. The torrents were small. Usually less than 10 in the swarm. So far TPB has beat it every time when the same files were available. It did have some rare files that I couldn't find on TPB or btjunkie though.

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This is my configuration:

http://img824.imageshack.us/img824/6439/utorrentk.png

... and i don`t have any troubles :)

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Originally Posted by gojirasan

Why is it too high? I do have DHT enabled.

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Because there's a small amount of traffic spend in maintaining a connection open, even when you're not uploading or downloading anything. Now, multiply that by all your idle connections. Having DHT enabled adds even more overhead, from that point of view.

I have a 3Mbit line and I can max my download out with these settings:

• Global connections: 130
• Connections per torrent: 30
• Number of upload slots per torrent: 3
• Use additional upload slots if...: yes

uTorrent has a built-in speed guide and tester which should automatically find the best settings for your line, try it!