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.
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