UDP tracker
The UDP tracker protocol is a high-performance low-overhead BitTorrent tracker protocol. It uses the stateless User Datagram Protocol for data transmission instead of the HTTP protocol regular trackers use. The data is in a custom binary format instead of the standard bencode algorithm BitTorrent uses for most communication.
URLs for this protocol have the following format:.
Comparison with the HTTP tracker
The UDP tracker is better optimized and puts less strain on the tracking server. Neither tracker has any effect on transfer speeds.Clients implementing the protocol
- BitComet
- BitLord
- BitRocket
- BitSpirit
- Deluge
- FlashGet
- KTorrent
- libbt
- Libtorrent (Rasterbar)
- qBittorrent
- rtorrent
- μTorrent
- Turbo Torrent
- Vuze
- XBT Client
- MLDonkey
- Transmission
- Tixati
Criticisms
- Limited IPv6 support
- No mechanism for index sites to scrape an entire tracker
- * This can be supported by traditional TCP scrape mechanisms, as it's not a performance issue.
- No mechanism for trackers to enforce client restrictions
- The UDP tracker protocol has no field to represent the user agent, as the HTTP protocol has. However, the convention to encode the user agent and version inside the peer_id field still applies.
- No mechanism for trackers to send warning messages
- No compression, especially problematic for large announce responses.