up2date, mirror repositories, and performance

[Martin Alderson]

On 18 Feb 2004, at 20:38, seth vidal wrote:

>
>>
>> If Fedora actually becomes super popular, it will need to scale.
>> I'd hope that up2date would just point to a torrent tracker, and
>> bittorrent would fetch the files.
>> This is exactly what bittorrent is supposed to do.
>> Too bad I couldn't code my way out of a paper bag, or I'd put my code
>> where my mouth is.
>
>
> Bittorrent does NOT work for MANY small files.
> it only works well for single LARGE files or full dirs of files that
> result in a large size.
>
> <50M bittorrent doesn't payoff.
>

Not true, IMO. It requires very little to add a Bittorrent seed to an 
existing Apache server (mod_bittorrent, IRC) so why not do it? Sure, 
you have a bit of overhead, but it would be worth it. You could even 
have a BitTorrent service that runs in the background and shares the 
updates.

That's the only plausible explanation that I can think of that would 
mean BitTorrent would not be efficient (not enough users sharing at one 
time - but there will always be at least one - the normal HTTP server).

Also, update filesizes can sometimes be more than 20MB which is more 
than reasonable to spread the load with other users.

Martin Alderson,
IntechHosting

Email: martin at intechhosting.co.uk
Web: http://www.intechhosting.co.uk