Pirate Bay Power Usage Equivalent to a Vacuum Cleaner

One part that really makes The Pirate Bay very efficient is their torrent tracker software. Unlike Python and PHP implementations, theirs is written in C, with very little dependencies. It's called OpenTracker — <a href="http://erdgeist.org/arts/software/opentracker/" rel="nofollow">http://erdgeist.org/arts/software/opentracker/</a>. It's intended to run on a WLAN router; it's <i>that</i> efficient. Especially see the "Philosophy" section :)<p>Of course, other projects can also use this for very legal purposes. E.g. my <a href="http://driverpacks.net" rel="nofollow">http://driverpacks.net</a> project uses torrents for distributing (legal!) downloads to avoid expensive server bills. The infrastructure is simple: a central OpenTracker instance, plus a few seedboxes (±$15/month) that get new files via rsync (to guarantee each file always has seeders), and voila: terabytes per day of traffic at ±$1/day. Live stats at <a href="http://driverpacks.net/stats" rel="nofollow">http://driverpacks.net/stats</a> — powered by <a href="http://drupal.org/project/opentracker" rel="nofollow">http://drupal.org/project/opentracker</a>.<p>Hopefully this is useful for somebody :)

My calculations might be wrong, but 2.5 kW * 24 hours * 31 days is 1860 kWh, and the utility bill sitting on my desk says I'm paying about $0.10 per kWh. That's $186 a month, which pays for an awful lot of vacuuming.<p>I'm sure that they're quite efficient compared to other high-traffic websites, but this is a pretty silly way to show it.

Why in the article they are comparing megaupload with TPB? Megaupload needed those servers because they were hosting the files. TPB only has torrents to download and they were using P2P to distribute the files.

And the power of all the PCs idling to be available to serve up chunks of torrents? Seems like making a comparison to eg Megaupload and leaving that part of the equation out is disingenuous at best.

A large vacuum cleaner... running 24/7.<p>Impressive nevertheless.

Not in the US it isn't -- a wall socket is typically only rated to provide about 15 A * 120 V = 1800 W peak usage (* 80% = 1440 W long-term), which is less than their 2.5 kW vacuum cleaner. <a href="http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/maxload.html" rel="nofollow">http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/maxload.html</a><p>15 A at 240 V could power it, though, if there's a vacuum cleaner that needs that much power.