Some months back, Project Gazelle was launched. It was an attempt to build a new and improved BitTorrent tracker script. The ultimate goal is to produce a new framework for private torrent sites, faster than the common TB source, while being more secure from a code point of view, easier to modify, and more flexible.

TorrentFreak covered Gazelle at various points along its development. From inception, through beta testing, to its public dÃ©but on What.cd, we’ve followed the development and progress. That progress has now lead to what could arguably be the most important day in any product’s lifecycle , initial release day.

Yes, all those nay-sayers and early fans that have populated the comment sections of our previous stories on Gazelle can finally prove theÂ exploitsÂ andÂ badÂ codingÂ that they’ve been claiming, as the first public release candidate of the script is now available for download.

Reactions from those that have given the site a try, have been mostly positive. The main negative comments stem from the fact it’s not an intuitive install. Part of that comes from the memory caching software , memcached , which gives the project its ‘blazing speed’. Also, right now the system uses XBTT as a tracker, but we’re told that it will have its own (multithreaded) tracker ready for later versions, codenamed ‘Ocelot’.

Also, as things stand, while they hoped for around a doubling of capacity over the older TBsource script, in practice it’s become more like double that, meaning a 10,000 user site under TBSource can probably handle 40,000 without any major difference in site response or system load. Project head WhatMan told TorrentFreak: “We out-shot our initial projections by a very wide margin.”

Interest in Project Gazelle has been fairly strong, and at least half a dozen sites are now running the new script. Perhaps more interestingly, though, is that Gazelle isn’t JUST a torrent site. Due to its modular nature, it can be used for regular sites as well. It’s a bit like a content management system in that respect, and perhaps our earlier comparison to Diferior wasn’t all that far from the mark.

If you’re interested in getting your hands on the Gazelle code, then just head over to the project site and follow the instructions. The whole kit-and-caboodle is released under a modified version of the GPL, so have fun.