1.1 Petabytes of files on BitTorrent, network issues

Posted: Sun Oct 19, 2008 1:03 am

This kind of went unnoticed, but files contained in torrents indexed globally on isoHunt has past the 1 petabyte mark is is currently at about 1.1 PB. I think that says something about how BitTorrent has become a staple of content distribution, and a congratulations to all the seeders. Share on!

As for number of torrents indexed, here's an update to stats of our torrents index count, currently at 1.45 million:

Keep in mind again that our search index is not the same as most tracker sites, and a common misconception is that isoHunt.com is a tracker. As a search engine, we continually update our index from more than 400 other torrent sites we index, and at the same time, spam/fakes and old, inactive torrents are automatically pruned. That's why in the above graph you see some dips, where new torrents weren't indexed as fast as old torrents were pruned.

Speaking of spam and fakes, it is sad but a fact that with popularity, BitTorrent attracts a new flood of spammers in trying to advertise their websites or get their malware installed by unsuspecting users. It's a problem we take seriously, and since we added comments, tags and ratings to our search results (which you have used with great success), we worked on new ways to prune spam out of our index. You can of course help by more commenting, tagging and rating down torrents you find to be not what their filenames suggest or is blatant spam/malware. On your login page, if you have turned on the Download History Manager, you would see a list of .torrent files you've downloaded. If you completed downloads on them, I'm sure other users would appreciate your feedback on the authenticity of those torrents, just as you would find feedback by others useful before you download.

And I'm curious as to how bad you think is the torrents spam problem, and how bad is it on isoHunt.com. We can use your feedback on how we may improve quality of our search results.

On the login page, you may have already noticed also a new feature: friend invitations. In the spirit of peer to peer, invite your friends to join a new world of sharing and discovery with isoHunt and BitTorrent!

Another (temporary) issue we need your feedback on is connectivity issues for the past week. Either there's issue with our upstream router, or internet issues with routes from networks in reaching isoHunt.com. We saw particularly issues with Eastern Europe in reaching us, and our outgoing emails to certain domains were also affected. This may have been fixed now, but if you still can't reach isoHunt.com or after a few hours you still have not received your activation email on site registration, please comment here (if you have a way to obviously) or email admin at isohunt.com. Running traceroute from your command prompt to isohunt.com would be useful, as well as what what country and what ISP you are at.

Posted: Sun Oct 19, 2008 3:43 am

Had me worried; problems accessing since 15th October;suddenly all OK again on Saturday afternoon - no idea what happened !!

Just for the record, live in Spain, ISP provider Tele2( just bought out by Vodafone over here). Have heard that they are not keen on P2P sites.....

Keep up the great work - thanks guys!!

Posted: Sun Oct 19, 2008 5:50 am

thanks for the great work. Isohunt is my favourite. I'd create GOLD section of torrents, which would include just one perfect torrent for every major release, so ppl are concentrated on it and keeping it alive as long as possible. GOLD torrent should be approved by isohunt authority as best working one for particular release.

thanks

Posted: Sun Oct 19, 2008 5:59 am

zollino wrote:

thanks for the great work. Isohunt is my favourite. I'd create GOLD section of torrents, which would include just one perfect torrent for every major release, so ppl are concentrated on it and keeping it alive as long as possible. GOLD torrent should be approved by isohunt authority as best working one for particular release.

thanks

While this is a great idea, its impracticle both for legal reasons and the huge amount of data that we would have to download to even attempt it, let alone the hours (years) it would take to sort through the millions of files available! This why we have comments for files, so users can talk to each other about quality etc etc.

Gratz IH, another milestone passed! Well done. Wink

Posted: Sun Oct 19, 2008 8:24 am

Indeed. Another great milestone crossed and hopefully more will surpassed in the future!!

As Omega50 said golden torrents kinda are a pain for the administrators of any site that implements them.

Posted: Sun Oct 19, 2008 8:55 am

The only problem I'm seeing with the comment/rating system is that people argue about whether cracks/keygens are spyware or not. Some of it is the fault of crappy anti-virus, some of it is people not understanding that the file-patching function of cracks, in fact, *do* act the same way as viruses.

E.g. a comment from "Google Earth Pro 4.2 [pre-patched]"

Quote:

I used Avast!, Kaspersky & CA Anti-Virus (Computer Associates) Nothing reported except Avast! flagged the Logo Remover as a MALFORMER.

A Malformer is a program that changes the memory and structure of another program, and well obviously thats what a crack does.

Posted: Sun Oct 19, 2008 11:05 am

My congratulations to Isohunt. Now lets march towards the next unit(dunno the name of the next bigger unit..hehe).

Posted: Sun Oct 19, 2008 1:38 pm

intennsive wrote:

My congratulations to Isohunt. Now lets march towards the next unit(dunno the name of the next bigger unit..hehe).

That would be an exabyte Wink

Grats to ISOhunt! been using & abusing you for years and this is my 1st post

*Slaps himself*

Posted: Tue Oct 21, 2008 9:36 am

IH wrote:

... BitTorrent has become a stable of content distribution..

Did you mean to say staple?

Anyway, thanks for all your hard work! This site ROCKS!! Very Happy

Posted: Tue Oct 21, 2008 10:09 am

Woah petabytes lol! I thought at first this was something to do with pedophiles! Very Happy

Anyways this is some really good news. It shows just how popular torrents are. Ive never even heard of anything above a terabyte!!
Usually itssimple to tell fo a spam torrent. With movies it should just be the name of the movie like this: " Pineapple Express.avi "
It should just be something simple like that maybe with the year name. Proper ones have the upper nickname and brackets around the tyoe and year with also .'s for each association. Oh and im not able to rate torrents badly. All it says is add +1

Posted: Tue Oct 21, 2008 3:39 pm

Malware torrents are an even bigger problem than spam imo, especially any torrents of new movies or popular TV shows. That's why it is so vitally important for members to take a minute and rate torrents you have downloaded. It saves the rest of us the trouble and others will do the same for you.

Just my $0.02.

Posted: Tue Oct 21, 2008 5:33 pm

fibreoptik wrote:

IH wrote:

... BitTorrent has become a stable of content distribution..

Did you mean to say staple?

Anyway, thanks for all your hard work! This site ROCKS!! Very Happy

thanks for spellcheck Wink

Posted: Wed Oct 22, 2008 12:17 am

pmgroses1958 wrote:

Had me worried; problems accessing since 15th October;suddenly all OK again on Saturday afternoon - no idea what happened !!

Just for the record, live in Spain, ISP provider Tele2( just bought out by Vodafone over here). Have heard that they are not keen on P2P sites.....

Keep up the great work - thanks guys!!

I was also locked out starting Oct 14th. I initially thought the server was overloaded b/c of the Canadian election but the problem persisted,. Then I thought it might be because I had continuing erratic problems with the spam blocker because I had had an url in my first ever post.
Definitely my IP address was tagged somehow because by using a Hide IP/address rerouter I was able to access the site and login in as well.
The problem resolved about Sunday 19 or thereabouts, not when sure as I had just left it alone for a while.
I have been using ISOHunt for about two years that was the first time I had any trouble, I guess it was coincidental that I had just registered for the site a few days prior. But the co-incidence and the time gave me palpitations.
Everything OK Now, this is a great service, always my first hunt.

Thanks

Posted: Thu Oct 23, 2008 12:06 am

I had the same problems at the same time but it applied to all related sites, Torrentbox, Podtropolis and Hexagon.

Posted: Thu Oct 23, 2008 1:23 am

Hey,

Just letting you know that our University, Cogeco, and various other providers in the city of windsor, ontario , were part of this downtime.

I ran a traceroute and it seemed to be some sort of router several hops from your site.

No ICMP made it all the way to your site, though the dns response was still fine. Normally, however, such traffic works fine (and it's fixed now!)

I feared the worst at first... I'm sure you all know what I mean Shocked

Thanks for being active in keeping isohunt live Very Happy

Edit: In my traceroute, the last hop that worked was one somewhere in shaw's network. Dunno what that means but i think one of the plugs fell out or something

Ps your spam filter was flagging me for having the site (isohunt d_o_t c_o_m) in this post before i pulled it out Cool