Pirate Bay Power Usage Equivalent to a Vacuum Cleaner | Hacker News Reader

Pirate Bay Power Usage Equivalent to a Vacuum Cleaner

torrentfreak.com

30 pointschinmoy18 comments

One part that really makes The Pirate Bay very efficient is their torrent tracker software. Unlike Python and PHP implementations, theirs is written in C, with very little dependencies. It's called OpenTracker — http://erdgeist.org/arts/software/opentracker/. It's intended to run on a WLAN router; it's that efficient. Especially see the "Philosophy" section :)

Of course, other projects can also use this for very legal purposes. E.g. my http://driverpacks.net project uses torrents for distributing (legal!) downloads to avoid expensive server bills. The infrastructure is simple: a central OpenTracker instance, plus a few seedboxes (±$15/month) that get new files via rsync (to guarantee each file always has seeders), and voila: terabytes per day of traffic at ±$1/day. Live stats at http://driverpacks.net/stats — powered by http://drupal.org/project/opentracker.

Hopefully this is useful for somebody :)

I thought they no longer ran a tracker. Does this piece of software fulfill other roles, or am I just mistaken?

Are you perhaps thinking of their change from .torrent files to magnet links? My understanding is that the tracker is something of a necessity.

I thought that they switched to only serving torrent files and having people rely on other trackers, and then later moved to replace all the torrent files with magnet links.

My calculations might be wrong, but 2.5 kW * 24 hours * 31 days is 1860 kWh, and the utility bill sitting on my desk says I'm paying about $0.10 per kWh. That's $186 a month, which pays for an awful lot of vacuuming.

I'm sure that they're quite efficient compared to other high-traffic websites, but this is a pretty silly way to show it.

Why in the article they are comparing megaupload with TPB? Megaupload needed those servers because they were hosting the files. TPB only has torrents to download and they were using P2P to distribute the files.

Perhaps a site called TorrentFreak believes that BitTorrent is more efficient than cyberlockers.

Technically you'd have to factor in all the computers which are part of the BitTorrent network, wouldn't you?

And the power of all the PCs idling to be available to serve up chunks of torrents? Seems like making a comparison to eg Megaupload and leaving that part of the equation out is disingenuous at best.

The original point of P2P was that those costs are both sunk and not your problem.

The hardware cost is sunk, but the additional electricity you use by serving things out over bittorrent instead of idling isn't.

A large vacuum cleaner... running 24/7.

Impressive nevertheless.

Not in the US it isn't -- a wall socket is typically only rated to provide about 15 A * 120 V = 1800 W peak usage (* 80% = 1440 W long-term), which is less than their 2.5 kW vacuum cleaner. http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/maxload.html

15 A at 240 V could power it, though, if there's a vacuum cleaner that needs that much power.

I think you might find industrial vacuums that draw that much power. Those floor buffer things do at least I think.

Not if they plug into a traditional wall outlet. There are rules and laws about these things.

If the outlet has a T-slot on one side, it can take 125V 20A plugs (125*20 = 2.5kW) as well as the traditional 125V 15A plugs. They're different plugs. You can't pull 20A across 15A wires. That's how you get electrical fires (or, ideally, blow fuses/trip circuit breakers).

Ah yeah. I was thinking that the T-slot ones could handle much more power than that.

It's amazing what a wall socket will do under duress. I was drilling a hole in an exterior wall and accidentally draped the power cord into a puddle at the exact point where the drill cord met the extension. I got a big shock (I had contact with the puddle) with some effort dropped the drill that I was sort of force clenching, and ran/stumbled inside and turned off the mains. I couldn't work out why the fuse didn't blow until I pulled it out. Someone had stuck a paper clip across it, presumably after running out of fuse wire. The extension lead had welded its contacts to the drill lead as well. A lucky/unlucky combo that has taught me a lesson in electrical safety.

For what it's worth, on Amazon.de the top result is a 2400W device, and devices below 2kW are the exception. Other appliances like electric kettles are also often 2kW+.

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