ExTracker

Infrastructure

bittorrent tracker

SHOW HN2025

394points
72comments
#120of 3,837 in 2025
Top 4%of 2025 by points

How HN took it

DebatedReal support and real criticism

7 positive, 10 neutral or asking, 0 mixed, 6 critical, out of 23 comments about the project. Thread score +0.11.

Idea: 1 for, 4 againstDesign: 1 for, 1 againstExecution: 1 for, 1 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Impressive, well-written Elixir code

    From 1 comment
    • This is really good, my dude. I took a peruse through the code and I'm definitely impressed, this is like, code I would expect my senior engineers with elixir experience to turn…
      andyleclair on HN
  • ETS makes it highly parallel

    From 1 comment
    • I feel like ETS has been the real killer feature to pull this, being able to concurrently read and write from protected tables makes the whole thing incredibly parallel
      dahrkael on HN
  • Elixir suits protocol parsing and concurrency

    From 1 comment
    • Not sure about C++ devs, but Erlang/Elixir are great to handle parsing of protocols, with its implementation of pattern matching. Also, makes the code much cleaner because…
      uncircle on HN

Objections

  • Design is procedural rather than OTP-first

    From 1 comment
    • I really wished to see an OTP-first design. Unfortunately for me, the code is almost procedural as it's touching ETS or Application, which is built on ETS, in nearly every…
      nesarkvechnep on HN
  • HTTPS does not work out of the box

    From 2 comments
    • I tried it, couldn't get HTTPS to work. Also my console gets spammed with: 04:43:20.160 [warning] invalid 'event' parameter: size: 6 value: "paused" but it seems to work. I…
      KomoD on HN
    • Telemetry for the HTTP side is in my ToDo list yes, since I'm using a 3rd party library for the webserver I still need to figure out how to do it right. For HTTPS to work you…
      dahrkael on HN
  • Console spam from BEP 21 paused event

    From 2 comments
    • I tried it, couldn't get HTTPS to work. Also my console gets spammed with: 04:43:20.160 [warning] invalid 'event' parameter: size: 6 value: "paused" but it seems to work. I…
      KomoD on HN
    • The "paused" event is part of BEP 21. Clients send it to the tracker to let it know that the client is still incomplete, but won't download anymore. For example, because a user…
      bill876 on HN

Requests

  • Add OpenTelemetry or Logger instead of IO.puts

    From 2 comments
    • Well done. Couple quick notes, move to a logger instead of using IO.puts. Also consider adding OTel.
      voicedYoda on HN
    • I'll second this, just using the built in Logger [0] and Telemetry [1] applications would be fine, opentelemetry or anything else can be added to the telemetry hooks easily to…
      solid_fuel on HN
  • Support private tracker use

    From 1 comment
    • Very cool! Is this suitable for using as a private tracker?
      bavell on HN
  • Benchmarks against opentracker

    From 1 comment
    • Hey congrats on the launch! Can you provide any details on how it runs compared to opentracker? I'm really interested in the performance etc.
      abrookewood on HN

Questions

  • How does performance compare to opentracker?

    From 2 comments
    • Hey congrats on the launch! Can you provide any details on how it runs compared to opentracker? I'm really interested in the performance etc.
      abrookewood on HN
    • For small trackers opentracker is probably faster and use a bit less memory. Where extracker is gonna shine compared to it is when core count starts having 2 digits. I still have…
      dahrkael on HN
  • Is it suitable as a private tracker?

    From 2 comments
    • Very cool! Is this suitable for using as a private tracker?
      bavell on HN
    • not out of the box but it can be done. All the required moving parts are there (hash whitelist support, udp path parsing, peer rejection, etc).
      dahrkael on HN

Alternatives named

  • opentracker

    From 2 comments
    • The maker's post
    • For small trackers opentracker is probably faster and use a bit less memory. Where extracker is gonna shine compared to it is when core count starts having 2 digits. I still have…
      dahrkael on HN
  • aquatic

    From 1 comment
  • torrust

    From 1 comment

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

Add a badge to your READMEShown on HackerShow
[![Shown on HackerShow](https://hackershow.org/badge.svg)](https://hackershow.org/show/44323253)