Hekate — a highly-concurrent BitTorrent seeder.

Hekate is a BitTorrent seeder (informally, a ‘‘BitTorrent server’’, or software for your ‘‘seedbox’’) designed to handle millions of simultaneous torrents and tens of thousands of simultaneously connected peers.

(This is not a typo. We envision Hekate to be used just like a web server -- just dump millions of torrents into your public_torrents directory, without worrying which are popular.)

Hekate is written in CPC, an experimental concurrent dialect of C. In order to build Hekate, you will need to install the CPC compiler first.

Features and limitations

Hekate has the following features:

• hybrid architecture combining a fast event loop with a thread pool;
• non-blocking disk reads;
• writes from memory-mapped files (no user-space copy);
• DHT (Mainline);
• IPv6;
• limited support for LTEP (no PEX yet).

Hekate has the following limitations, many of which are there by design:

• a pure seeder: Hekate uploads only;
• passive connections only: Hekate will not work if it is behind NAT;
• no user interface, Hekate is a daemon;
• Hekate does not enforce fairness between peers: while rough fairness is enforced at low load, at high load more aggressive peers will be favoured;
• Hekate is early beta software, and while it has undergone a fair amount of testing, it hasn't been used in production yet.

Resources

Please read

• the Hekate manual,
• Attar and Canal's report about Hekate (in French).
• Hekate on OpenWRT, with pretty screenshots.

Download

Hekate is experimental software, and is currently only available from a Git repository:

You may also browse Hekate's source code on Github.

Authors

Hekate was written by Pejman Attar, Yoann Canal, Juliusz Chroboczek and Gabriel Kerneis.

Back to my BitTorrent page. Back to my software page.

Juliusz Chroboczek