Trackers

Trackers are the servers that introduce BitTorrent peers to each other. The more healthy trackers a torrent announces to, the faster you find peers — which matters most for magnet links and poorly seeded torrents.

Motrix maintains a curated tracker list for you: it downloads well-known community lists on a schedule, probes each tracker’s health, drops the dead ones, and appends the survivors to your BitTorrent tasks. The Trackers page in the sidebar is where you watch and tune this machinery.

The Effective tab#

The Effective tab lists every tracker currently being injected, with its Health, Response (ms), Last probed time, and Source. The master switch — “Inject curated trackers” — turns the whole feature on or off. Sync Now forces a refresh; the filter box narrows the list by URL.

Tracker sources#

The source selector decides which lists feed the curated set. Two community lists are built in — ngosang/trackerslist and XIU2/TrackersListCollection — each with a CDN-mirrored variant (badged cdn) that’s useful when GitHub is slow or blocked from your network. You can also Add any plain-text list of your own by URL (https://example.com/list.txt), or remove sources you don’t want.

The Blacklist tab#

Some trackers are misconfigured or outright suspicious. With “Apply blacklist filter” on, Motrix blocks connections to trackers flagged as Suspicious or Error; the tab shows how many URLs are currently in effect.

Sync and probing settings#

The knobs live in Settings → BitTorrent → Trackers:

Setting	Default	Meaning
Auto Sync	on	Refresh the tracker lists on a schedule
Sync Interval	12 h	How often to sync (1–168 hours)
Enable Probe	on	Test each tracker’s health before using it
Probe Timeout	—	Max wait for a probe response (1000–30000 ms)
Healthy Threshold	—	Max response time still counted healthy (500–10000 ms)
Min Success Rate	—	Drop trackers that fail more often than this (0–1)
Max Tracker Count	50	How many trackers to inject per torrent (5–200)

The defaults are sensible; the setting most worth knowing is Max Tracker Count — a bigger number is not automatically better, since every tracker costs announce traffic.

Per-task trackers#

Each torrent also has its own tracker list — open the task’s detail panel and switch to the Trackers tab:

• Edit lets you paste tracker URLs, one per line (http(s), udp, and ws(s) only). Saving replaces the task’s effective tracker list; the announce list embedded in the .torrent itself is never touched.
• Sync re-applies the current global curated list to this task.
• A drift indicator like “3 not in global” tells you the task’s list has diverged from the curated one.