YIFY-Torrents, or YTS as it's now formally known, is one of the world's most popular torrent sites. But how does it handle so many visitors without collapsing and how is all that arranged behind the scenes? TorrentFreak caught up with a YIFY developer to find out what makes the machine tick and we came back with a unique insight into the internal workings of this popular download portal.

Needing little introduction, YIFY (now correctly called YTS) is one of the world’s most popular sharing sites. At the start of 2014 it was the 5th most popular torrent site in the world and according to brand new figures provided to us yesterday, the site is currently handling around 10 million visits per month.

Speaking with TF, site developer Jduncanator says that since last month’s rebranding the team have been not only working on new features, but also making sure that existing processes are fine-tuned. The dev says that user experience at YTS is paramount.

Don’t make users wait

“Studies show that 100ms is how long you have for the user to feel like the task was instantaneous. One second is how long you have for the user’s state of flow to remain uninterrupted (though the delay will still be noticeable). Ten seconds is how long you have before the user loses interest entirely and will want to multi-task while the task is completing,” JD explains.

“That 100-1000ms sweet spot is something most web developers aim for, but whats even more surprising is that only around 5% will actually achieve that. An average visitor will spend between 30 seconds to 4 minutes on YTS, so each individual page load will make up a large proportion of their overall user experience. This is what we wanted to focus on heading into 2014.”

Google-powered

One key upgrade towards achieving that aim is the inclusion of a brand new protocol called Spdy (pronounced Spee-dy), a Google-developed protocol designed to shift web content.

“Google’s new protocol enables extremely low latency round-trip times and compression of headers. All leading (up-to date) browsers support SPDY 3 and so now do our servers allowing for high speed access and connection to all of our site,” JD reveals.

While most site visitors won’t have any idea that things have changed, JD says that behind the scenes that’s definitely not the case. Network infrastructure has undergone significant upgrades, enhancing not only speed but security and overall experience.

Security

“With the latest NSA revelations and with overall ‘security’ paranoia going through the roof we decided to revise our current security setup to see if we could do anything better – turns out we could,” JD says.

“We used to have 2048-bit RSA keys. These by themselves don’t pose a security risk, but if we are to go by anything the NSA reports show, they could possibly have the technology to crack these more efficiently than the public. To be on the safe side, we decided to double the key size to 4096-bit RSA which effectively multiplied the amount of time to crack our encryption keys by 2³².”

And then, despite our requests to keep things pretty simple, JD just couldn’t contain himself, detailing the site’s BEAST attack protection, OCSP stapling enabling and HSTS implementation. Needless to say, he’s passionate about the site and keeping it finely tuned – fortunately he doesn’t mind if those listening need to Google acronyms every two minutes either.

“You can see a report of our SSL over here. We score an A+ and are in the top 3%, something even Google couldn’t achieve,” he proudly adds.