UDP Auto-Probing
One of our wonderful features is getting some much needed love. We (specifically, The_8472, kudos to him) introduced this feature in a beta build back in January, 2008, and released it to the masses in our 3.0.5.0 release in March of that same year.
Let’s travel back to 2008, when the opentracker blog posted an article on The UDP Situation. In it, there was this juicy request:
We hereby invite all client authors to probe the corresponding udp announce address, store the result on a per-tracker base, use udp whenever feasible (i.e. for announces and [non-full-]scrapes) and revert to tcp only if udp fails.
A few months later, a followup article, named auto-UDP up and running was written after it was discovered Azureus had implemented this feature. Coincidence? We’ll never know.
With this feature enabled, we do a UDP check on first scrape or announce to http trackers. If that fails, we fall back to the http request and exponentially retry UDP in future scrapes/announces. If it succeeded, we store that information for later sessions.
We are always looking for ways to reduce bandwidth. If you have any suggestions, please feel free to post them on our forums.
