aquatic_ws: high-performance open WebTorrent tracker

High-performance WebTorrent tracker for 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

Known users:

tracker.webtorrent.dev (wss://tracker.webtorrent.dev)

Performance

More details are available here.

Usage

Compiling

Install Rust with rustup (latest stable release is recommended)
Install cmake with your package manager (e.g., apt-get install cmake)
Clone this git repository and enter its root directory
Build the application:

# Recommended: tell Rust to enable support for all SIMD extensions present on
# current CPU except for those relating to AVX-512. (If you run a processor
# that doesn't clock down when using AVX-512, you can enable those instructions
# too.)
. ./scripts/env-native-cpu-without-avx-512

cargo build --release -p aquatic_ws

Configuring

Generate the configuration file:

./target/release/aquatic_ws -p > "aquatic-ws-config.toml"

Make necessary adjustments to the file. You will likely want to adjust address (listening address) under the network section.

Running behind a reverse proxy is supported, as long as IPv4 requests are proxied to IPv4 requests, and IPv6 requests to IPv6 requests.

Running

Make sure locked memory limits are sufficient:

If you're using a systemd service file, add LimitMEMLOCK=65536000 to it
Otherwise, add the following lines to /etc/security/limits.conf, and then log out and back in:

*    hard    memlock    65536
*    soft    memlock    65536

Once done, start the application:

./target/release/aquatic_ws -c "aquatic-ws-config.toml"

If your server is pointed to by domain example.com and you configured the tracker to run on port 3000, people can now use it by adding the URL wss://example.com:3000 to their torrent files or magnet links.

Load testing

A load test application is available. It supports generation and loading of configuration files in a similar manner to the tracker application.

After starting the tracker, run the load tester:

./scripts/run-load-test-ws.sh

Details

Aims for compatibility with WebTorrent clients. Notes:

Doesn't track the number of torrent downloads (0 is always sent).
Doesn't allow full scrapes, i.e. of all registered info hashes

aquatic_ws has not been tested as much as aquatic_udp, but likely works fine in production.

Copyright and license

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

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