Server Struggles Slow Torrent Hub LokiTorrent

The BitTorrent hub LokiTorrent is experiencing outages and slowdowns today, as it continues to try and restore full service following a server hard drive failure last week. Administrators said the site is operating on a backup server "only on a 10Mbit pipe" rather than its usual 200MB connection.

LokiTorrent is among the most visible portals supporting BitTorrent, the popular distributed file-serving technology developed by Bram Cohen. LokiTorrent is among the sites facing lawsuits from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) over the use of BitTorrent in illegal file-sharing.

A dynamically upgrading chart of www.lokitorrent.com is available here.

Torrent hubs SuprNova.org and TorrentBits.org shut down last month, shortly after the MPAA launched its legal initiative. LokiTorrent announced that it would fight the MPAA lawsuit, and has raised more than $25,000 in user donations since the MPAA suit was announced.

BitTorrent breaks large files into smaller chunks ("torrents") and allows users to simultaneously upload and download them to more efficiently share large files. The open source BitTorrent software has been downloaded more than 20 million times, and P2P service provider CacheLogic has estimated that torrent-related traffic accounted for more than 30 percent of all Internet traffic in the first half of 2004.