Mainline Dht Increases By 15 Million Peers In 7 Days - Reasons?

[kjresearch]

Hello everyone,

 

I am a German researcher studying decentralized systems. We have been monitoring the BitTorrent Mainline DHT (MDHT) continuously since 2010. Till last week, our measurements estimated the size of the MDHT (the number of concurrently participating peers) to lie between around 6 and 9.5 million peers (the number changes during the course of the day).

 

Since last Friday (May 9th), the size of the MDHT started to increase massively by up to 2 million peers a day. We expect our estimations to reach 25 million peers today (as I write, we are at 23 million). That means, the MDHT almost tripled in size in 7 days!

 

Assuming we do not find a really weird bug in our measurement routines that suddenly decided to manifest - does anyone of you have a possible explanation for this phenomenon? My first idea was that uTorrent may have made changes to their NAT traversal component or something similar. Is anything like this the case?

 

Thanks in advance,

KJ