aquatic: high-performance open BitTorrent tracker

High-performance open BitTorrent tracker, consisting of sub-implementations for different protocols:

Name	Protocol	OS requirements
aquatic_udp	BitTorrent over UDP	Unix-like
aquatic_http	BitTorrent over HTTP, optionally over TLS	Linux 5.8 or later
aquatic_ws	WebTorrent, optionally over TLS	Linux 5.8 or later

Features at a glance:

• Multithreaded design for handling large amounts of traffic
• All data is stored in-memory (no database needed)
• IPv4 and IPv6 support
• Supports forbidding/allowing info hashes
• Prometheus metrics
• Automated CI testing of full file transfers
• Optional periodic exports of full scrape statistics (UDP only)

Known users:

• explodie.org public tracker (udp://explodie.org:6969), typically serving ~100,000 requests per second
• webtorrent.dev (wss://tracker.webtorrent.dev)

Performance of the UDP implementation

More benchmark details are available here.

Usage

Please refer to the README pages for the respective implementations listed in the table above.

Auxiliary software

There are also some auxiliary applications and libraries.

Tracker load testing

Load test applications for aquatic and other trackers, useful for profiling:

• aquatic_udp_load_test - BitTorrent over UDP
• aquatic_http_load_test - BitTorrent over HTTP
• aquatic_ws_load_test - WebTorrent

Automated benchmarking of aquatic and other trackers: aquatic_bencher

Client ⇄ tracker communication

Libraries for communication between clients and trackers:

• aquatic_udp_protocol - BitTorrent over UDP
• aquatic_http_protocol - BitTorrent over HTTP
• aquatic_ws_protocol - WebTorrent

Other

• aquatic_peer_id - extract BitTorrent client information from peer identifiers

Copyright and license

Copyright (c) Joakim Frostegård

Distributed under the terms of the Apache License, Version 2.0. Please refer to the LICENSE file in the repository root directory for details.

Trivia

The tracker is called aquatic because it thrives under a torrent of bits ;-)