Article by George Norman

On 06 Nov 2008

The Pirate Bay, which has recently made the news for hosting pirated versions of the pre-Beta PDC Windows 7 operating system, is experiencing a boom in popularity. Exactly one year ago, the month of November 2007, the number of people who frequently visited the Swedish tracker doubled from the previous year, reaching 6 million. In 2008 the number has more than tripled, reaching a record breaking 22 million peers (all unique peers). The most amazing part of it all is the fact that the number of peers is expected to keep on rising.

According to Peter Sunde, co-founder of The Pirate Bay, in the past the number of peers that the site could handle was limited. Since limitations are never a good thing, measures have been taken to increase that limit. This means that whenever there is money to spare, The Pirate Bay people will invest it back in the site. The number of servers is constantly growing, the software applications are frequently improved upon, and hardware components are regularly upgraded for newer and more efficient versions.


The Pirate Bay has another ace up its sleeve. One of the main reasons it is able to deal with the multimillion peers is because it does not use TCP tracker but instead uses more resource efficient UDP trackers. Since the budget is an issue, any means of cutting resource consumption is more than welcomed. Peter Sunde said once that he would like to have an open budget that would allow for the purchase of about 10 new servers.

It is estimated that by the end of the year the number of unique peers tracked by The Pirate Bay will increase by about 15%, meaning it will reach the 25 million mark. Keep in mind that this is the month of November and the end of the year is just a stone’s throw away.

Just to put things in perspective, out of all BitTorrent users about half of them turn to The Pirate Bay, which is great for the Swedish tracker’s popularity, but it also singles it out as the most prominent provider of pirated content. And if the sh*t would ever hit the fan, The Pirate Bay has a big bright bulls eye on its back – in the case of a copyright infringement case for example, the pirates would certainly be the ones to walk the plank first.



Tags: The Pirate Bay

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