Mike McGrath wrote:
Jonathan Steffan wrote:
The amount of storage and bandwidth able to be saved can be illustrated
by a simple comparison between the efficiency of chopping up a 3.4GB
iso9660 file system arbitrarily (by a static chunk size) and the same
file system based on contents (file by file.) For a BitTorrent,
Fedora's current choice for sharing Spins, the hosted data is only
valid for a given chunk on a single ISO. This data's footprint (equal
to the combined chunk sizes of the entire torrent) can be used for
nothing but this Spin. To be able to host 5 Spins composed from similar
trees via BitTorrent, we now have a footprint of 17GB, not to mention
"seeders" have to run BitTorrent software to be able to contribute to
the swarm. Alternatively, Jigdo can be used to reduce the footprint of
these 5 Spins to about 4GB. The amount of additional data needing to be
hosted for each Spin, in addition to what data is already pushed to the
mirrors, is about 150MB per ISO with anaconda and about 200KB for ISOs
without the installer bits. To help illustrate the efficiency of using
Jigdo vs BitTorrent, the footprint for 250 Spins is 850GB for
BitTorrent and about 40GB for Jigdo. Additionally, a reduction in
overhead can be achieved by removing the need for the BitTorrent
tracker and all related network traffic without requiring any
additional work on the part of mirror administrators.
My concern with jigdo is with how many people use it? It seems silly to
host both torrent and jigdo (as much of this letter points out the
benefits of switching to jigdo, those benefits disappear if we simply
add jigdo to the mix. Most people already have bittorrent. Lets say we
were going to give Jigdo a trial run for Fedora 9
FYI, we have done so, and we are doing so officially for Fedora 9.
and we were going to
judge jigdo a success if a certain % (compared to bittorrent) use
jigdo. What % would that be?
Jigdo would in this case be particularly useful to those with a local
mirror as they have 99% of the content already (90% if you have F9T3?).
Because it is particularly useful to some, and completely weird and
strange for others, the number of users that will use it if BitTorrent
is an alternative wouldn't be a very good indicator to see if it is
actually a viable distribution method for the whole of Fedora, neither
is it the goal for these proposals.
However on the other hand we do have a couple of people with local
mirrors, and last time I checked, test releases are downloaded a couple
of times. We are hoping that these users in particular try out Jigdo and
become happy bandwidth and time savers.
For the Fedora Project, the greatest benefit of doing a trial Jigdo
release with Fedora 9 is to get to know the feeling, see the numbers,
get some feedback, and not having to host 68GB of Everything spins on
different media, instead of 450MB -giving the same results. The same
goes for any other additional installation media composed off the
release tree -even rebranded downstream distributions, although there
isn't much of those as long as updates keep expiring from the mirrors.
The original proposal was in fact that Fedora 9 CDs would be released
and hosted by Fedora Project but it seemed to be a better path to do so
via Release Engineering
While google trends is sort of crazy in that I don't know what it says,
it does say something:
http://google.com/trends?q=bittorrent%2C+jigdo
Right, I do hope our gut feeling rather then the number of hits on
Google comes up with a decision...
Another consideration in the entire footprint discussion may be to
expire FC{1,2,3,4,5,6} from the master mirror.
Kind regards,
Jeroen van Meeuwen
-kanarip
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