There's not really a coherent distributed system for the torrent files, but there's not really a need, the ad-hoc system works pretty well. The real problem is

There's not really a coherent distributed system for the torrent files, but there's not really a need, the ad-hoc system works pretty well. The real problem is tracking the active clients -- without widespread DHT trackers like TPB would have collapsed under their own weight years ago. As it is there's frequent timeouts and massive response latency. It doesn't help that the software running the trackers is almost universally awful PHP garbage.