The state of isoHunt and P2P

Posted: Fri Sep 15, 2006 1:51 am

First of all, a quick note that although not much change maybe seen on the surface, much has been either fixed or upgraded our isoHunt's backend. Among them are:

* more natural advanced searching, ex. search for "term1 OR term 2" no longer needs () around them
* vastly improved torrent categorization: 3 times less torrents now remain uncategorized than before, and their accuracy has been improved to a point that you can rely on it to narrow down your results (when your search terms is ambiguous for different things)
* internationalization: non-English search is now fully working, at least from what I've tested with European characters
* 25% more total peers is now seen from our indexed torrents

On that last point, I'd like to commemorate in particular that peers summed from our torrents, indexed from across the web, hitted 10 million today (up from 8 million record before). Considering that our torrents index is the largest on the web (search with same terms on other sites and see for yourself in number of results), our enhanced scraping now gives a pretty good picture of just how big BitTorrent has become.

3 years ago, when I first added BitTorrent search to isoHunt (which was before Suprnova started for you history nerds), BT was just a technical curiosity with a protocol and reference implementation. Now, with Kazaa gone and eDonkey hurt, I think it's fair to say that BitTorrent has become the largest P2P "network". I hesitate to say network, as BT works on swarms and there's no network to tie them all together, besides search sites like isoHunt.

Now, some stats for you:

* isoHunt currently has 331031 unique and active torrents indexed
* out of these, 247882 have Seed/Leecher stats, while 165882 are seeded
* the global Seed:Leecher ratio is 1:1.3 (3.9M vs. 5.1M)
* avg. breakdown is 11.8 seeds/torrent and 15.5 leechers/torrent
* global peers total at 9M at present

What I'm getting at is the active population for the BitTorrent "network". The problem is each person maybe running multiple torrents simultaneously, on 1 computer or on multiple, and the global peers doesn't account for overlap of peers for the same user between torrent swarms (so it's more than the actual population).

So here's a little survey for you guys. As empirical as this is, we should have a vague idea of how many people are actively using BitTorrent at any given time. Please vote under this thread on how many simultaneous torrents you run, on average. Dividing the global peers count by the average of our votes would be the actual population. This is not accurate to much statistical standard, as people who care to vote here should be the more hardcore group of the general population, who is likely to run more torrents simultaneously than more casual users. Prove me if I'm wrong, but here's the survey anyways. Vote with the most accurate average you can that you usually run with.

PS. I'm placing my guess on the average simultaneous torrents people run at around 2, which would place the BT active users online at 4-5 million. Just a hunch.

Posted: Fri Sep 15, 2006 6:32 am

Wow interesting stats there!

Your close with the average i suspect to, considering the wild fluctuation in bandwidth speeds globally. I selected 3 as my average. I was running a great deal more at any one time in the past but due to my unusual upload speed, having anymore than 3 torrents seeding at a time severly impairs the speed they upload at.

For example, seeding 4 100mb torrents, a few days can go by and the total uploaded is minimal, each uploading about 0.3!!! I tend to just upload one or two at a time now, in a rotary fashion for all my torrents.

Downloading.. well theres not many things im after a the moment so i will have about 3 downloading maximum at a time.

Posted: Mon Sep 18, 2006 7:47 am

I try to keep my torrents down to around 10 active at once although they do get up to 20 at times. Rather than stop my torrents that are lagging me I just limit them to 1kb/s upload.

Posted: Mon Sep 18, 2006 9:14 am

Usually I'am uploading 3 and downloading 1.
Using ***limiter and all that is useless, rather quit the torrent and continue later.

Posted: Mon Sep 18, 2006 4:51 pm

i have 583 torrents active and seeding on a server with 5Mbit duplex that costs me 65 euro per month to lease

the server can handle more (both memory and cpu to spare) but i have a problem finding a client that can run more torrents. atm i use Azureus (great queue config) and only 20% of torrents are ever active (uploading) at any time (rest are queued because swarm has plenty seeds). if anyone has experience of seeding more torrents then please i am interested to hear what client you use and your config

i seed for www.h33t.com which i respect because it is advert and pop-up free = no profit from copyright = no pirates

Posted: Tue Sep 19, 2006 9:14 am

well,i run about 3 at max.i limit my upload speeds to 4.0 per seed.azureus is permanently active on my system,with at least 6 standby downloads i check once everyday.yep,but 3 is the limit for my connection....

Posted: Tue Sep 19, 2006 9:00 pm

http://piracyisnotacrime.com/

Posted: Wed Sep 20, 2006 1:09 pm

well I usually have 4-6 torrents active, right now I have 4...

but I have 46 torrents that are actually listed, and they become active and inactive as the need for seeds increase. as a result of my bonded T1 (good ol work connection, hey being the IT Director pays off) my share ratio is 3.6:1 which is about 3.2TB uploaded, and .9 TB downloaded. .

Is it bad that some torrents never reach 1:1? ...there are just too many seeds...and a lot of torrents that are posted I've seen (like duplicates) can result in the leeching numbers of people.

Posted: Wed Sep 27, 2006 8:45 pm

I dont know how to seed but I always share, on my site (which recently got hacked) RapMusicWorld.com, I have just had stuff uploading on BitLord for days shareing. Like Say I download something, I let it run another 24 hours for others to download what I just got. If I knew how to make my own seed on here I would probuly have ALOT more to contribute.

Posted: Sun Oct 01, 2006 6:22 pm

you'll find all the info u need to upload your own torrents on this forum Very Happy

Posted: Tue Apr 03, 2007 3:25 am

i just go one at a time, the most important goes first like lost Bow

then prisonbreak Very Happy

then whatever torents i happen to be downloading at the time.

______________________________
"Force is the weapon of the weak"
Did i help you? Give me +1 rep. It makes me look good.

Posted: Tue Apr 03, 2007 4:23 am

I usually have one downloading and one or two uploading at same time. Smile

Posted: Tue Apr 03, 2007 11:24 am

I up about 30 at a time and download maybe 1 a week seed it to a 2 ratio depending on how many seeds vs leechers there are.

Posted: Sat Aug 18, 2007 10:43 pm

HBS wrote:

Wow interesting stats there!

Your close with the average i suspect to, considering the wild fluctuation in bandwidth speeds globally. I selected 3 as my average. I was running a great deal more at any one time in the past but due to my unusual upload speed, having anymore than 3 torrents seeding at a time severly impairs the speed they upload at.

For example, seeding 4 100mb torrents, a few days can go by and the total uploaded is minimal, each uploading about 0.3!!! I tend to just upload one or two at a time now, in a rotary fashion for all my torrents.

Downloading.. well theres not many things im after a the moment so i will have about 3 downloading maximum at a time.

my average is around 90 -up to around 100 just now 83 about half are seeds -is this wrong then? only thing is i know what it is like to get to over 90 % and seeder pulls out wish i could strangle them advice on this would be appreciated

Posted: Sun Sep 09, 2007 10:00 am

I always assumed people just ran them all at once, which is often terribly inefficient due to upload speed constraints that most users have.

The poll results pleasantly surprise me! Very Happy