Archive for the 'Mininova technical' Category

Mininova downtime

Published
by
Erik
on April 30, 2008
in Mininova technical
. 156 Comments

Hi all,

As many of you noticed, Mininova experienced a massive blackout this week. The problems begun when the hard disk of our load-balancer (running LVS) started having issues (random freezes and crashes). When attempting to fix these issues, our hosting company found some other problems and were unable to start the server up again. Combined with the fact that we’re now in the midst of two successive holidays in The Netherlands, this all resulted in an extensive downtime of Mininova.

We’re very sorry for the inconvenience you might have experienced. We are still investigating the problems, and will do our utmost to prevent similar issues in the future.

Thank you for your continued support!

– The Mininova staff

Update: news coverage by TorrentFreak.

Cool new features + toolbar

Published
by
Niek
on February 9, 2008
in Mininova technical and Mininova-related news
. 40 Comments

Hi all,

We’re excited to announce several new (and in our opinion, very cool) features! Let’s kick off:

Streaming of distributed music torrents

Screenshot of music streaming

In close cooperation with the guys from BitLet, we added a “stream this music” button to torrents containing music (MP3/OGG Vorbis) files (example). This feature allows you to play the music right in your browser, without the need to download the content with a BitTorrent client. Note that this feature is only enabled on distributed (featured) torrents. Artists who’re interested in this feature: sign up for our free Content Distribution service.

Updating seeds/leechers statistics

Screenshot of statistics updating
This one was on top of the list of requested features. Our scraper system updates all torrent statistics several time a day. Many people think this is not enough, so we added an “update” button. With just one click, the statistics are up-to-date again. Note that this feature is only available for registered users, and there’s a time constraint per user and per torrent.

Tracking your comments

This is a nice feature for our active commenters. We already had the my torrents page, and now there’s also my comments. Did you forget where you left a comment? Just check out this page to find it back.

Mininova toolbar

Screenshot of the Mininova Toolbar
Last, but absolutely not least, we’re happy to announce the Mininova Toolbar. This toolbar (available for Firefox and Internet Explorer, Windows/Linux/Mac) is the perfect way to stay in touch with Mininova. The toolbar features integrated RSS feeds, category browsing, quick shortcuts and of course torrent searching in your browser. Give it a try: the toolbar is absolutely spyware/adware free!

Do you miss some features? Or have you got an awesome idea? Please let us know, and we’ll look into it :)

Thanks!

More than 3 billion downloads!

Published
by
Niek
on November 1, 2007
in Mininova technical and Mininova-related news
. 147 Comments

We are pleased to announce that Mininova reached the milestone of 3 billion (3.000.000.000) torrent downloads today!

In January this year, Mininova reached 1 billion downloads and in June 2 billion downloads. This means we probably won’t reach the 4 billion downloads before the end of this year (as we hoped), but more likely in 4 or 5 months from now. The news-site TorrentFreak has more detailed info.

To avoid some confusion: we’re counting the number of times a .torrent file is downloaded from our website, not how often the data described in the .torrent file is completely downloaded by a peer.

We also reached new heights in the Alexa statistics, Mininova currently ranks as one of the 60 biggest websites in the world.

To cope with this growth, we added some server-power the past weeks. Tomorrow another new server will be installed. More statistics of our servers can be found on the Mininova graphs page.

This all is great news, which wouldn’t have happened without the support of you (the users) and our moderating team. Thanks a lot!

There’s some more great news coming up the next couple of days, so please stay tuned :)

Updates for Mininova and Snotr

Published
by
Jos
on September 21, 2007
in Mininova technical
. 79 Comments

It’s been a while since the last technical update. So today, we added some new functionality for Mininova and Snotr to make your life easier :)

Updates for Mininova:

  • Number of comments in the tables. If a torrent has one or more comments, the Comment icon icon and the number of comments is shown. Clicking on the number or icon will take you to the comment page of the torrent.
  • Subcategory information in the tables. When you move the mouse cursor over a torrent, its subcategory shows up next to its name.

Updates for Snotr:

  • The video cloud. An interesting way to browse the videos.
  • The video wall. A quick way to find a specific video if you remember its thumbnail image.
  • Quick submit link. Explained on the submit page. This link makes it easier to submit videos to Snotr.
  • Animated thumbnails. When you move the mouse cursor over a thumbnail, an animated version of the thumbnail is shown.
  • Better video encoding method. Already in use since a few weeks, and results in smaller file sizes.
  • Some bug fixes.

As always, we would like to hear your suggestions and ideas. Please comment on this blog post to share your thoughts.

Edit (24 September):

Two more small improvements for Mininova:

  • Comments posted by the uploader of the torrent are shown in green. Example here.
  • The “number of comments” icon (see above) is now always at the right side of the column, so it’s easier to compare torrents in a table.

2 Billion Downloads!

Published
by
Niek
on June 13, 2007
in Mininova technical and Mininova-related news
. 155 Comments

Just 5 months ago we blogged about the 1 billion download milestone, and I’m very happy and excited to announce that we broke the 2 billion (2,000,000,000) torrent downloads mark today!

This is very good news, it means our site is growing exponential: the amount of total torrent downloads roughly doubles every half year. And more downloads means more exposure, so more content available on our website. There is also a story on TorrentFreak about this milestone.

I thought it would be nice to show a breakdown of the download numbers per category, so here is a graph:

Torrents category Percentage of total downloads
Anime 3.61%
Books 3.04%
Games 6.59%
Movies 17.89%
Music 21.21%
Pictures 0.53%
Software 5.61%
TV Shows 40.11%
Other 1.42%

This clearly shows that TV Shows content is more popular than ever, followed by Music and Movies.

Of course this is not the end, if the growth keeps continuing we might be able to reach the 4 billion mark by the end of this year! Watch out, Apple iTunes…

Direct RSS feeds

Published
by
Matthijs
on May 26, 2007
in Mininova technical
. 25 Comments

As you might know, all our RSS feeds point to the “General info” pages of torrents. However, this is not very convenient when using our feeds in combination with torrent clients that require direct links to the .torrent files. We got quite a few mails from people that asked for an option to let the RSS feed link directly to the .torrent files.

So how do you change your feed to point to the .torrent instead of the “General info” page? Well, all you have to do is add “?direct” (when it’s the first “argument”) or “&direct” to your RSS feed!

So the global feed would become (note the question mark):
http://www.mininova.org/rss.xml?direct

All other cases require a ampersand:
http://www.mininova.org/rss.xml?cat=8&direct

Even though this flag was around for quite some time, not many people probably knew about it, hopefully this post changes that :)

Technical issues April 18

Published
by
Matthijs
on April 19, 2007
in Mininova technical
. 40 Comments

After having quite some issues earlier tonight we made some source code changes. This proved to be a bad strategy (we didn’t test these changes enough) and we ended up with a corrupted database. We are restoring a backup as we speak, but many of the torrents uploaded today are probably lost. We are going to try and restore those as well, but our first priority is to restore the backup of this morning.

If you uploaded torrents today, please re-upload them again as soon as we are up and running again.

Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for understanding!

Instant update: We’re up again! Minus all torrents of today, unfortunately…

Extra server power…

Published
by
Niek
on February 12, 2007
in Mininova technical
. 116 Comments

Hi!

Just a heads up, we added some extra servers to the website, so everything should run a bit smoother from now on :) We’re currently also testing a new scraping (updates of seed/leecher numbers) system, this will significantly improve the accuracy of those numbers.

As always: in case you spot any problems, please let us know. Thanks!

Update: As some of you asked, here are the specs of the servers added:

  • Database slave: 2x Opteron 165 dual core, 4G DDR, RAID-1 (custom built)
  • Web server: 2x Opteron 165 dual core, 4G DDR, RAID-1 (custom built)
  • Advertisements web server: 2x Opteron 244, 2G DDR, RAID-1 (Sun V20z)

1 Billion Downloads!

Published
by
Matthijs
on January 8, 2007
in Mininova technical and Mininova-related news
. 129 Comments

Yes people, that’s not a joke! Today we hit the one billion (1,000,000,000) torrent downloads mark!

There are just a few days left till we’re going to celebrate our second anniversary, so the timing couldn’t be any better ;) In May last year we wrote about the 400M downloads mark, so in less than 8 months we counted 600M downloads.

Of course this is not the end! Looking at the counter, we see another few million downloads per day coming in, and increasing.

Thanks everyone for sticking with us! Stay tuned for the next big mark :)

More updates…

Published
by
Niek
on December 28, 2006
in Interesting links, Mininova technical and Mininova-related news
. 38 Comments

Hi, I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas time! I will use this blog post to share some updates with you.

First of all, the new website: it took a while, but it seems that the new server setup is working fine now. We still need to fine-tune some areas, which will happen next week. Thanks everyone for reporting bugs and glitches!

Some people noticed that specific search queries return wrong results. For example, searching on “French” only returns old torrents. We hope to fix this issue in a few days. Update January 6: this problem is solved now.

Some other people reported that searching for “bla” does not return results for torrents with the name “blabla”. This so called “prefixed searching” is not possible yet with the new searching backend (Sphinx), but we hope to have this fixed somewhere in January. Update January 8: and this problem has been solved as well.

Enough about technical issues, on to the good news: several news sources (BBC, CTV, Torrentfreak) reported that “Mininova” was the ninth most Googled term in 2006. It’s good to see our site between the top-10 most popular search terms, but it probably also means the homepage of Mininova is not very trivial to find. We promise you we’re going to work on this issue next year!

And now for something else, the guys over at BitLord have released a TV show for the BitTorrent community. Mininova also plays a prominent part being the sponsor of the Torrent Top List. The guys at BitLord told me the first episode would be a first attempt at a show so they will improve it as time goes. But I have to say, the first episode is a nice start. Make sure to download the first episode here.

OK, that’s it for now… have a nice year-end and till next time!