aquatic

Blazingly fast, multi-threaded UDP BitTorrent tracker written in Rust.

Aims to implements the UDP BitTorrent protocol, except that it:

• Doesn't care about IP addresses sent in announce requests. The packet source IP is always used.
• Doesn't track of the number of torrent downloads (0 is always sent).

Supports IPv4 and IPv6.

Installation and usage

Install rust (stable is fine) with rustup, as well as cmake. Then, compile and run aquatic:

./scripts/run-server.sh

To print default configuration as toml, pass the "-p" flag to the binary:

./scripts/run-server.sh -p

Example output:

socket_workers = 1
request_workers = 1

[network]
address = '127.0.0.1:3000'
max_scrape_torrents = 255
max_response_peers = 255
peer_announce_interval = 900
socket_recv_buffer_size = 524288
poll_event_capacity = 4096

[handlers]
max_requests_per_iter = 10000
channel_recv_timeout_microseconds = 200

[statistics]
interval = 5

[cleaning]
interval = 30
max_peer_age = 1200
max_connection_age = 300

[privileges]
drop_privileges = false
chroot_path = '.'
user = 'nobody'

To adjust the settings, save this text to a file and make your changes. The values you will most likely want to adjust are socket_workers (number of threads reading from and writing to sockets) and network.address. (Some documentation of the various options is available in source code file aquatic/src/lib/config.rs.) Then run aquatic with a "-c" argument pointing to the file, e.g.:

./scripts/run-server.sh -c "tmp/aquatic.toml"

Benchmarks

Performance was compared to opentracker using aquatic_load_test.

Server responses per second, best result in bold:

workers	aquatic	opentracker
1	n/a	177k
2	168k	98k
3	187k	118k
4	216k	127k
6	309k	109k
8	408k	96k

(See documents/aquatic-load-test-2020-04-19.pdf for details.)

Copyright and license

Copyright (c) 2020 Joakim Frostegård

Distributed under Apache 2.0 license (details in LICENSE file.)

Trivia

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