Analyzing and modeling of the BitTorrent (BT) resource popularity and swarm evolution is important for better understanding current BT system and designing accurate BT simulators. Although lots of measurement studies on BT almost cover each important aspect, little work reflects the recent development of BT system. In this paper, we develop a hybrid measurement system incorporating both active and passive approaches. By exploiting DHT (Distribute Hash Table) and PEX (Peer Exchange) protocols, we collect more extensive information compared to prior measurement systems. Based on the measurement results, we study the resource popularity and swarm evolution with different population in minute/ hour/day scales, and discover that: 1) the resources in BT system appear obvious unbalanced distribution and hotspot phenomenon, in that 74.6% torrents have no more than 1000 peers; 2) The lifetime of torrents can be divided into a fast growing stage, a dramatically shrinking stage, a sustaining stage and a slowly fading out stage in terms of swarm population; 3) Users’ interest and diurnal periodicity are the main factors that influence the swarm evolution. The former dominates the first two stages, while the latter is decisive in the third stage. We raise an improved peer arrival rate model to describe the variation of the swarm population. Comparison results show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art approach according to root mean square error and correlation coefficient.