[Locke1689]

I have a little experience in designing software for HPC that, for the most part, is quite a bit more complicated than a BT tracker. Here's something I found on the opentracker website:

All technologies to implement this are around for more than twenty years. Still most implementations suck performancewise.

I have a feeling that mediocre programmers (or programmers who really don't know as much about systems as they think they do) are to blame here :(.

Edit: A little more detail.

Opentracker is built by a C programmer who knows his stuff. He knows that disk access in a app like this would be suicide and designed around that. Advantage #1.

Opentracker uses libowfat which looks to be written by another good systems programmer with an eye for clean design. He has also had a quite a bit of time to perfect his implementation. Advantage #2

Libowfat is inspired and partially architected using libdjb written by Dan Bernstein (a phenomenal old school systems developer with a long track record). His design models have been at work for years and years. Bernstein is truly a 'legend.' Advantage #3

Short answer: same as always; smart people doing smart things :).

[sedachv]

Thanks for the pointer to libowfat, looks quite interesting!