July 17, 2008 by sharky
Most of you are probably already aware that "elite" private BitTorrent sites are locked in a perpetual race to get the latest ‘warez’, trying to outdo their competition and claim the bragging rights for having a new release "first". For those of you that have more than one good private tracker, likely you’ve noticed that some just seem to have an advantageous angle to "the scene" and, time-after-time, come up with the latest torrents before anyone else. Certainly, if you have an account at ScT - notoriously known for the best pre-times among all private trackers - this is not new information to you. Users of public trackers such as Mininova and ThePirateBay normally have to wait for the ‘trickle-down’ effect; that is, until a torrent gets ‘leaked’ out from one of the major 0day trackers. Thus, the pre-time for a scene-released torrent at mininova will be far longer than the pre-time at ScT.
So, which tracker has the best pre-times? And how is this calculated?
Some trackers go so far as to actually publish the pre-time information along with the torrent. If we wanted to do some extremely tedious research, we could have just logged into some of these elite trackers and manually crunched the numbers, and calculated an average pre-time. But we didn’t.
Instead, we shifted our focus to an IRC pre-channel (also known as "tracers" channels) - it shows the latest scene releases as they happen. Also displayed are the exact pre-times, and the 0day tracker that "won" the race to get the torrent first. Below is an example of what is displayed for a particular race. Note that SCC won this race by having the shortest pre-time:
We won’t publish the URLs for most of these fine 0day trackers, but here’s a look at the abbreviations of the 15 major players, and total number of wins, as stipulated by the IRC channel:
- ScT — 5,646 wins.
- GFT — 3,274
- SCC — 2,238
- TL — 1,764
- RB — 1,061
- BN — 473
- FTN — 374
- FSC —244
- ScL — 201
- CT — 196
- FTWR — 149
- RTT — 127
- BMTV — 99
- DH — 32
- TBy — 22
Thus, it would be safe to conclude that ScT usually has the best pre-times among all private trackers, when averaged out over a considerable time span. Having said that, GFT is quickly gaining ground, which is rather remarkable for a tracker that is so new to the BitTorrent scene.
Pre-times — The Calculations
So we know who "usually" has the best pre-times when it comes to the races, but we didn’t stop there. We wanted some real data, tangible numbers attached to each tracker. To derive an actual average pre-time for each one, we simply left the IRC channel running over a period of four days (96 consecutive hours), and processed the races.
After importing the IRC log file into a spreadsheet, we ‘averaged’ out the statistics for each race. NOTE: All pre-times in excess of one hour were dropped from the calculations, thus eliminating any distortion that would occur when pre-times went into days, weeks, months and even years. One hour was the cut-off.
| Tracker: | Avg. Pre-Time: | Comments: |
| ScT | 2 min, 4 sec. | Out of 258 races that they were in, they came first 201 times. No surprise that ScT wins! |
| BN | 2 min, 37 sec. | Found in 142 races - won 15 (mostly Pr0n torrents were the winners - this helped immensely with their ‘average’ pre-times). Probably the most consistent pre-times of all the trackers. |
| RB | 3 min, 5 sec. | Listed in 338 races, came first in 101 of them. Many of the wins came from ‘exclusive’ Pr0n Imagesets, whereby RB was the only contenders in the race. |
| FTN | 3 min, 28 sec. | Found in 113 races, won only 12. However, they finished in the #2 spot a very respectable 48 times. |
| GFT | 3 min, 43 sec. | Involved in 316 races, and won 137 of them. GFT was a ‘darkhorse’ pick, and really surprised us here. |
| FSC | 7 min, 3 sec. | Out of 89 races, they only won the races where the content was exclusive to only them. Still, very respectable pre-times for such a small tracker. |
| SCC | 7 min, 42 sec. | Involved in 185 races, and managed to win 44 of them. |
| CT | 8 min, 59 sec. | Was entered in 42 races, and won only one of them. |
| ScL | 10 min, 53 sec. | 88 races entered. Won 6. Many of their pre-times were past “one hour” and thus omitted from the stats. Perhaps their pre-times are even worse than reported here. We were disappointed in ScL’s results. |
| TL | 13 min, 48 sec. | Involved in 282 races, won 83. Most of their wins came from being the only group in the race (i.e. the torrent is exclusive to them). Statistics for TL were difficult to calculate, since many of their pre-times exceeded our “1 hour” cutoff - thus, TL’s pre-times are actually much longer than this generous statistic. |
| TBy | 30 min, 45 sec. | 44 races entered, 8 wins. |
| RevoTT | 32 min, 24 sec. | Managed to win just once in 79 races. Many of RevoTT’s pre-times hit the one-hour cutoff, and weren’t calculated - this figure is generous. |
| FTWR | 32 min, 30 sec. | Entered in 37 races, won just 2. Out of all 37 races, only six managed to break the ‘one hour’ pre deadline, the rest of the pre-times were in hours, even days. You’ll have better luck finding your torrents on mininova - they’ll probably show up there first before they do at FTWR. |
| BMTV | 33 min, 12 sec. | 77 races, 2 wins. More than half of the torrents had a pre-time over the one-hour threshold. 33 minutes is very generous. |
| DH | 33 min, 16 sec. | 22 races entered, no wins. Same as above. |
If you’d like a copy of the spreadsheet with a listing of the races and trackers, click here. Note that it was created in MS Excel 2007.
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