In an attempt to make BitTorrent more secure, and to reduce some of the load on their own tracker, The Pirate Bay has started to remove all duplicate, dead and anti-pirate trackers from the torrents they host. These changes will improve the trackers' performance, and increase 'security' for its users.

Running the largest BitTorrent tracker on the Internet requires a lot of expensive hardware. To keep this hardware running smoothly, The Pirate Bay is constantly optimizing their setup.

One of the latest changes is that they have started to automatically remove duplicate trackers from torrent files, to keep unnecessary connections between BitTorrent clients and their tracker to a minimum.

Pirate Bay co-founder TiAMO explained to TorrentFreak: “It’s totally unnecessary to have more than one of our tracker URLs when they all have the same peers, they just ask the tracker for the same data lots of times.”

“Also, now we can strip out all bad trackers from anti-p2p companies, as well as old ones that stopped working years ago,” he added. So, while they were at it, they have also decided to remove dead trackers, and BitTorrent trackers that are run by anti-piracy organizations. This makes it less likely that the MPAA and RIAA , often though companies like Mediasentry, can keep tabs on the download habits of Pirate Bay users.

Another advantage, of course, is that the number of fake files and spam from companies such as MediaDefender are kept to a minimum. Fake torrents are often used to trick people into downloading useless data instead of Hollywood’s latest blockbuster. The Pirate Bay already had quite a good track record when it comes to removing fakes, and this will only improve with these latest changes.

The Pirate Bay currently has 13 servers dedicated to the tracker, and another 14 servers for the website itself. Yesterday, the tracker broke a new record, with close to 18 million active users on “TV-torrent Tuesday“, and at the current rate, they will be tracking 20 million peers a few weeks from now.