Thread: Tracker returns 0 seeds and 0 peers

Now this problem puzzles me for a long time and I would like to seek some expert help here.

For some trackers, my uTorrent's tracker tab always shows 0 seeds and 0 peers. This happens to many trackers, including UG, TTG and some others.

I have managed to exclude some usual suspects:
1. It has nothing to do with torrent clients. I tried with transmission, various versions of uTorrent on several computers, and the results are the same.
2. It has nothing to do with ISP. The problem persists on two ISPs and two seedboxes.
3. It has nothing to do with the torrent itself. If it happens to one torrent in that tracker, then all torrents will show 0/0.
4. Of course, as 3 implies, the torrent has seeders and leechers, sometimes in the hundreds.

Now the even stranger thing happens, I disable DHT/peer exchange/local peer discovery as usual. So if the tracker returns 0/0, I would think I cannot download since I cannot find peers. But I can still download. Though I connect to less peers (this is just a hunch, since there is no way for me to scientifically prove it). I can even make outgoing connections (this would truly be impossible without knowing other peers' ip and port).

I wonder if anyone else has seen this problem? And what might have cause it?

Thanks for any answers and hints.

It is probably a problem the tracker not sending information to your client properly, though I could be wrong.

Originally Posted by The Mormon

It is probably a problem the tracker not sending information to your client properly, though I could be wrong.

I am pretty sure that it is the incorrect info sent by tracker. But why selected users? Why a certain tracker?

This has been a persistent problem for me. My TTG tracker has been doing this for more than a month. Even after tracker restarted the problem is still here.

This has to do with the code base the tracker uses. Some simply do not send that info to your client.

I don't know which code base is which but you'll notice all trackers that use the format

/announce.php?passkey=<passkeyhere> (eg RevTT)

will not return any seed/peer information to the client (with one exception I have noticed, where they append additional information after the passkey). Anything using the format

/<passkeyhere>/announce (eg TL)

will return the seed/peer information. Either code base could be reconfigured to send, or not send the details I'm guessing, but it is enabled by default in that second code base.

I think Gazelle and TBDev the two most common code bases used on trackers? Now to figure out which one is which.

Edit: Just did a search and see there is now TS-SE, FTS and BtiT code bases, not sure if they're modifications to a base Gazelle or TBDev or stand alone systems or if they send seed/peer info.

Q

Thanks. Tha't an interesting read. But if the tracker does not return seed/peer information, how does the BT clients connect to each other?

BTW, most of the trackers I used are based on NexusPHP, which in turn is based on TBDev. They seem to return info correctly. TTG is based on a house made codebase. But I asked around and most people do get the seed and peer counts. Any idea?

Originally Posted by chmmr

But if the tracker does not return seed/peer information, how does the BT clients connect to each other?

Sorry about that, slightly misworded. The tracker returns info about seeders/peers of course, IP addresses, ports etc, thats how Bit Torrent works :). I meant it doesn't bother sending summary information about seed/peer totals.

I can only comment on what I have observed with my trackers and clients. With the addition of your comment about some seeing it and others not I'm going to go with the guess of all code bases are returning seed/peer totals, but they use a different encoding method which certain clients can't understand or display.

I'm now going to go and test that theory with a number of clients I would never usually use myself.

Q

It is glad to know that I am not the only one who sees this. :)

I asked in TTG help channel and no one else noticed it. I was beginning to suspect some supernatural things happened. :)

rTorrent 0.8.6/0.12.6 - no
Transmission 1.93 (CLI scrape) - yes
uTorrent 2.0.2 - yes
uTorrent 1.8.4 - yes
Vuze 4.4 (windows) - yes (all grouped as peers?)
Deluge 1.3.0_rc1 (windows) - yes
Deluge 1.3.0_rc1 (linux) - yes

Which client do you use?

Q

I used transmission 1.9.2, uTorrent 1.8.2, 1.8.5, 2.0.1. No seed/peer info on any of them.