Monday, February 2, 2009

The Reaper

We finished and deployed "the reaper", (mentioned in the previous post), the automated process that will automatically delete torrents that haven't show any seeders in a week. Some additional details about how it works:
  • It will also delete the album associated to the deleted torrent.
  • If that album was the only one published by his artist, the artist will be deleted too.
  • The torrents pending for approval will be watched too.
For the torrents that are in the countdown to be deleted, you will see a notification announcing that situation and his remaining time. The notification will appear in any context where the status of a torrent is displayed, and, most importantly, as an alert in your profile page, where will list your published albums with dead torrents:



If you uploaded some torrents, we suggest that you take a look at your profile page to see if any of your uploaded albums are about to be deleted.

This is the notification in the album page:



And in your pending torrents list:



This new feature will help us to keep the website clean of dead torrents, and we hope that the notifications will encourage the users to keep seeding their uploaded albums.

Cheers !
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5 comments:

  1. I have uploaded two torrents that are about to be deleted due to a lack of seeders. The Coda page does indeed show 0 seeders, but when I downloaded the torrent to check the status in uTorrent it appeared that both torrents had more than 10 seeders, and the albums downloaded just fine. Maybe you need to fix this first, because a lot of torrents might get deleted needlessly.
    ReplyDelete
  2. @botch
    Yes I am getting the same issue as you. Yesterday it flagged 2 albums of mine as having no seeders. Today those 2 albums have now magically got seeders and now 5 different albums do not have seeders. The problem however is not the reaper itself - it is whatever code is used to check the active state of each torrent.

    There is a bigger problem with this that the coda fm developers need to sort out. Here is my explanation of it:

    If an album that is perfectly healthy (10+ seeds) and shows 0 seeds on the album page, then the reaper flags it. Now if any person visits the album page - they will see that there is no seeds or leeches so they ignore the torrent and don't download it because they obviously think it is dead, when in reality it is still very much alive. Now the whole point of the reaper is to give advance warning in order to save albums by seeding. Yet say for example that there is an album that has 5 seeds (so it could clearly do with more) is however showing 0 seeds on the album page - people will ignore downloading it because they will feel that the torrent is dead - when infact it is not dead - it has 5 seeders and it could certain use help to add more seeders to get it to a more safe level like 10+.

    While I understand the reaper is doing its job, unfortunately whatever code you have to check the active state of the torrents certainly needs to be fixed. On so many occasions I have seen 0 seeds on so many of the albums I have uploaded yet when I check the torrents in uTorrent - they are perfectly healthy. The bad news however is that when people see an album page show 0 seeds - they will think the torrent is dead and not download it - which is the very thing they need to do to ensure the torrent doesn't die!!!! (YEAH CRAZY, I KNOW!)
    ReplyDelete
  3. @dimsum, @botch:

    Yes, can be inaccurate at times, for these reasons:

    Sometimes, a working trackers doesn't respond, for a network error or a minimal downtime, and an error trying to contact a trackers is interpreted as zero seeders and leechers by us, and that's why a torrent can be appear dead or alive for time to time. Also, take in account that the process that check the torrents status could take a few hours in check it all and start again, and that can contribute to the duration of the perceived problem.
    Anyway, I'm looking at it closely, and so far is working ok, the problem looks to be the instability of some trackers. In any case, don't worry that much about the chance of torrents being deleted mistakenly, they have to be dead an entire week for that to happen, time that is reseted if there are seen alive again, even one time.
    Also, remember that when you use uTorrent, you might get some seeders via DHT, and we can't see those.
    Thanks for the feedback, I will look for a way to make it more reliable, based on this observations.

    Cheers !
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  4. Well, i adjusted some parameters on the reaper, now it will wait until 3 repeated failures of a torrent before marking it as dead. That could help to bring down the number of false warnings.
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  5. its awesome work.i liked so much your artical.its so nice to read.i would like to visit again.
    ReplyDelete

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