On Tue, 2004-03-23 at 04:39, fedora@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote: > I'd disagree about updates via BT not having a use. I'll be glad to see you prove me wrong but I don't think that will happen. > > >From the various comments relating to slow/failed downloads, and the > fedoralegacy.org people having trouble with bandwidth usage I'd say > that there are a reasonable number of concurrent downloaders, which is > an ideal environment for BT. You just restated the problem we all know - mirrors need to be more easily synchronized and people need to be able to use them with ease. > Given that most people will only download updates from the last few > days on a regular basis (i.e. do an update once a day, week, or > whatever), it's highly likley that most of the concurrent downloads > are for a small set of files. This is where your assumptions are getting flawed. That mostly works for rawhide but since people are in and out of sync you're going to have a hard time counting on this assumption. Moreover if the mirrors can't get the data there won't be anyone to seed the torrents. > The paper I sent the link for previously shows how the list of > available updates can be rolled up to make the most of BT features. > Combined with the ability to tune the size of download chunks it > should be reasonably easy to create a configuration which makes > effective use of the limited time people are online (e.g. for a 500kb > update use 50kb chunks would mean that each user would offer upto 9 > completed chunks before their download is complete). I read the paper, I don't think you're counting on: 1. startup overhead 2. cpu overhead 3. proxies/routers/port blocks upstream of the user 4. complexity of doing this all in the backend of up2date/yum/etc I've gone through the 'use bittorrent to download updates' concept before and it just doesn't pay off. Ask Adrian Likins what he thinks of it. He wrote up2date and worked on a bittorrent back end. I've had very long discussions with michael stenner who works on urlgrabber(the module yum uses to download) and it seems like bittorrent will be more pain than benefit, both programmatically and speed-wise. > I hope this helps you understand my motivation. I understand your motivation, definitely, but I'm concerned that you're focusing your attention in the wrong place. Again, I'd encourage you to do your work to make bittorrent a useful tool for synchronizing the official mirrors. It's a smaller problem to start with and a good place to cut your teeth in this area. -sv