Hollywood had hoped otherwise, but it has been a good year for The Pirate Bay, despite all the legal hassles. Most impressive is the explosive growth in number of torrents and peers that are using the Pirate Bay tracker.

The Pirate Bay now tracks nearly 1 million torrents and over 8 million peers at any given point in time. This is quite a change compared to last year, and there is no sign that this trend will stop anytime soon.

December 2006

576.080 torrents,

4.274.698 peers

December 2007

914.717 torrents

8.390.682 peers

To keep up with the growing demand from its users, The Pirate Bay has added more and more hardware to their server park. Another significant change this year is the migration from Anakata’s Hypercube to the open source Opentracker software. The new software is more stable, uses less resources and supports UDP tracking.

The Pirate Bay’s Brokep told TorrentFreak that they should be able to double the amount of peers on the trackers without any hardware upgrades. “Since the last performance tweaking and router-tweaking we’ve removed all bottlenecks.” Brokep said, and he expects the tracker to hit 10 million peers during the next big holiday.

There is also a downside to this positive news of course. The growth of The Pirate Bay is in part due to the problems at Demonoid had this year and the fact that Isohunt (TorrentBox) disabled access for US users to their trackers because of the issues they have with the MPAA.

Demonoid and TorrentBox were the second and the fourth most used public BitTorrent tracker respectively, so this was a great loss. It is estimated that approximately 50% of all public .torrent files are now tracked by The Pirate Bay, it is scary to imagine what will happen if their servers will stop working.

Luckily there’s also good news, as new trackers such as sumotracker.org and denis.stalker.h3q.com became pretty popular in just a few months. Both newcomers track more than a million peers now. Besides this, The Pirate Bay have already announced that they’re not going anywhere. They told us that they will simply move to another country if they are outlawed in Sweden, without downtime!