On Mon, Apr 14, 2003 at 04:14:23PM -0400, Caleb Shay wrote:
> What happens now is, if the user has the bittorrent FEATURE enabled, AND
> has bittorrent installed (much like what is required to use the ccache
> feature), and the package has a torrent available, we can then use
> btdownloadheadless.py or btdownloadcurses.py to download the file (ie,
> btdownloadheadl.py --url http://torrent.gentoo.org/${A}.torrent --saveas
> /usr/portage/distfiles/${A}).  This takes load off of the download
> mirrors, and helps everybody achieve maximum bandwidth while
> downloading.
Two questions here:
How much bandwidth is required for each bittorrent tracker? Nowhere I
have I seen this information.

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

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

> 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.

-- 
Robin Hugh Johnson
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