Calculate total number of actual seeders

Question

I'm creating a PHP torrent scraper based on the info hash of torrents. I managed to get the number of seeds and peers per torrent on a lot of trackers. But how do I calculate the 'average' number of seeds?

Is there something I can do with DHT maybe?

Answer 1

Wouldn't you just add up all the seeds per tracker, and divide that number by how many trackers there are if you want the average? I'm not sure of what info is stashed in the hash but this seems like a reasonable solution to calculate the average.

$seeds = 0;

foreach($tracker as $track) {
   /* 
    * Something along this line to add the current trackers
    * seeds to a $seeds variable
    */
   $seeds += $track['seeds'];
}

$average = $seeds / count($tracker);

Answer 2

As neither trackers nor the DHT provide exhaustive lists of unique IPs for all torrents or even for individual torrents beyond a certain size - as this would create way too much traffic for them - you cannot create those kinds of statistics yourself. At best you can sample individual swarms and extrapolate from there.

You need control over the tracker(s) if you want that kind of data.