Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3M peers

Kind of amazing how many clients kept pinging a tracker that had been offline for years. It shows how some parts of the internet just keep going in the background long after we stop noticing. There's something oddly persistent about that.

Yeah, I can imagine there's loads of people that set up a seedbox somewhere and just... forgot about it, or never bothered to tidy it up.

Many torrents are on multiple trackers and, via the almost ubiquitously supported announce-list extension, have multiple trackers listed in the torrent file itself. So those 3M clients are unlikely to have been sat doing nothing because this tracker had vanished, they would be participating in the swarms around the other trackers listed in the metadata for each torrent.