Data on torrents usage
So I updated my stats from 2017 and made new graphs to show how usage
of torrents has progressed since 2012.
https://smooge.fedorapeople.org/stats-torrents/
Due to the messiness of the logs.. the data logged is in an hourly
file which gives a checksum of the image being shared without any
knowledge of what that image is. [This is because tracker is meant to
be open and allow anyone to track whatever they want.] The logs only
say things like the number of peers, and the number of clients asking
for data. It isn't clear if it is showing the amount of actual
downloads completed or not. I decided to say it was.. but if that is
wrong, oops.
In general, I believe we should not stop producing torrents that
people can use. Running a tracker and dedicated seeder for that
tracker may be less useful for us because of the amount of work it
takes to keep it going. The problems are that development on headless
opensource trackers and seeders ended in 5-7 years ago. Someone in
release engineering has to patch something each release to keep it
going. In looking at various distributions, we seem to be the only one
still running a tracker. The others just produce torrent files and
seem to let the users find peers where-ever they can.
--
Stephen J Smoogen.