The UDP tracker protocol is a high-performance low-overhead BitTorrent tracker protocol. It uses the stateless User Datagram Protocol (UDP) for data transmission instead of the HTTP protocol (over TCP) regular trackers use. The data is in a custom binary format instead of the standard bencode algorithm BitTorrent uses for most communication.
Contents
URLs for this protocol have the following format: udp://tracker:port.
Comparison with the HTTP tracker
The UDP tracker is better optimized and puts less strain on the tracking server. Neither tracker has any effect on transfer speeds.
Clients implementing the protocol
Criticisms
References
UDP tracker Wikipedia(Text) CC BY-SA