Multi-tracker Problems

bemasher — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 10:48:57 +0000

I can't even begin to describe how annoying it is to download a torrent and to discover that the person that compiled it added a bunch of trackers to it but didn't bother to take into consideration that not all torrent clients (at least one) handle multi-trackers properly if you don't put blank lines in between each tracker.

Like so:

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http://tracker.openbittorrent.com/announce
udp://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80/announce

http://tracker.publicbt.com:80/announce
udp://tracker.publicbt.com:80/announce

Now I know for a fact that μtorrent requires this but I'm not sure about any other torrent clients. But the above list of trackers won't work properly. In fact only the http based trackers will register because of the blank line. For all of the trackers to be used each tracker must have a blank line following it.

Like so:

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http://tracker.openbittorrent.com/announce

udp://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80/announce

http://tracker.publicbt.com:80/announce

udp://tracker.publicbt.com:80/announce

So please if you're going to post create a multi-tracker torrent at least list all of the trackers properly because it will only do any good if every peer in the swarm has all of the trackers listed in the torrent. Unfortunately most people treat bittorrent like a "set and forget" sort of file sharing protocol but if you setup one small part like that wrong everyone suffers and most people simply won't notice.

A Little Off » μtorrent

Multi-tracker Problems