Brit Attempts Record Bittorrent Swarm Size

Records are made to be broken, or at least that’s the philosophy one UK man is taking. He wants to break the record for the most number of seeders on a torrent. The current record, as far as we’re aware, was set by an EZTV torrent and stands at around 124,000.

Bittorrent is a scalable system. Unlike most distribution methods, it doesn’t have much in the way of slowdown as the number of people involved increases. In fact, quite often it will increase in speed as more people join in. It’s a wonderfully efficient way to get data around.

There are some questions, and experimental limits though that exist purely theoretically. One of those is just how ‘big’ a torrent can be, and how many seeds it’s possible to get. According to the attempt page, the reason behind it was partly to see how big it could get, and part just for the desire to have a record established.

The attempt was first announced in the Pirate Party UK irc channel, on June 30^th, and has had a slow start, with a high so far of around 50, but it’s dropped off a little since. The content of the torrent is a simple image file, in total around 40kb (although a more appropriate choice would have been a copy of ELO’s album “A New World Record”). “The aim isn’t to max out or burden clients, but to have a small torrent constantly running,” we were told. “Just load it into your torrent client, and hit Force Start to keep it running, that’s all you have to do.”

The torrent can be obtained from both the piratebay, and EZTV, or by using these magnet links for utorrent and Vuze. We’ll keep you posted on how well it does.

Article from: FreakBits