Re: [gentoo-dev] torrent support in portage

[Caleb Shay <caleb@webninja.com>]

On Mon, 2003-04-14 at 21:38, Robin H.Johnson wrote:

> Two questions here:
> How much bandwidth is required for each bittorrent tracker? Nowhere I
> have I seen this information.

I'm not sure, but since it is only tracking who is up/downloading which
file, I wouldn't imagine it would be very much.

> 
> Secondly for people to be able to offer the package to the BT network,
> that means they would have it on their hard drive, and be running an
> active program to provide it 24x7.

There must be at least 1 person with the full file at all times, this is
generally (but does not have to be), the tracker server.

>  So far what I have seen of BT is that
> it takes one program instance per tracked file. In that case things are
> going to get very big, very fast.

Yes, it does.  I'm not sure of the overhead of each instance, but I've
come across sites with literally hundreds of files available.


>  Additionally I certianly will not be
> letting people eat the bandwidth that I pay for on my servers at work.

I'm not asking you to.  Set your upload cap to 2K and your simultaneous
uploads to 1 for all I care.  You only need upload for as long as you
are downloading.  Or, don't use it at all.

> Some residential cable and DSL ISPs are also very anal about bandwidth
> usage so that could cause serious issues there (a friends ISP limits him
> to 1GiB/day).

Then he probably wouldn't want to use it.  My ISP doesn't limit my
usage, so I would use it.

> 
> Your idea would be wonderful if bandwidth were free, or at least
> significently cheaper than it is now for much of the world.

But, in some parts of the world, it is pretty cheap, for those of us
that HAVE cheap bandwidth, we could be using each others and let those
of you with pay-by-the-minute access, small pipes, or bandwidth usage
limits make better use of the mirrors.  Everybody is happy :) 

> 
> > A bittorrent server (this is the infrastructure part), that maintains
> > torrents of the larger packages (I define larger as 20MB+), such as
> > XFree.
> Looking at the master distfiles directory, there are 343 files larger
> than 10MiB. Only 140 files larger than 20MiB. There are 9316 files in
> total, spanning 18Gb. The 343 files take up 9.4Gb of space. So they are
> definetely out of proportion. So having a lower limit would be better.

I chose 20MiB as an arbitrary number as "something that doesn't download
instantaneously on my cable modem", lowering it to 10MiB would still
work.


Cheers,

Caleb


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