Mininova, one of the largest torrent listing sites (for BitTorrent clients) may be a victim of its own popularity. The website has had recurring performance problems, likely due to a very high number of visitors. This month alone they have already clocked 23 hours and 11 minutes of downtime. The low point was in August, when the site was down a total of more than 3 days and 11 hours.
Another very popular torrent tracker, The Pirate Bay, had a problematic summer after the Swedish police confiscated their servers in a raid in May. Their website’s performance is more stable than Mininova’s, but in October they had more than 25 hours of downtime.
During the last 6 months, the Mininova website has been unavailable a total of 11,690 minutes, or 8 days, 2 hours and 50 minutes. During the same time, The Pirate Bay has been unavailable a total of 4,172 minutes, or 2 days, 21 hours, and 32 minutes.
Downloading music, games, movies, software, e-books and other material from the Internet has never been more popular, and it looks like both Mininova and The Pirate Bay have problems coping with the amount of traffic they are receiving.
(I you want to study the downtimes of these sites in more detail, have a look at the GIGRIB report page for Mininova and for The Pirate bay.)
