Is tracker related to torrent or downloader?

Question

Background

I'm trying to add some active trackers for transmission daemon to speed it up as I have done this before when using aria2.

But all the resources I found is how to add trackers to a torrent.

Question

So I'm wondering which is tracker related to? A torrent file or the downloader? If is the torrent file, how does I add trackers in aria2? The only way I can image is that aria2 automatically adds trackers to the added torrent.

BTW, how to add default trackers in transmission daemon just like in aria2?

Answer 1

Trackers can be centralized servers which you can request list of peers from.

The torrent file and the download don't go through the tracking server, the tracking server simply tells you from whom you can ask for pieces of the file from.

If you ask for more trackers, you won't download faster, you'll just have a wider pool of peers to pick from. If you want the download to be faster, you'll have to increase the amount of peers you are downloading from. (Tracking servers usually return 80 at a time I think in any case)

There are decentralized means of doing this using DHT (distributed hash table)