Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Caleb Shay <caleb@××××××××.com>
To: "Robin H.Johnson" <robbat2@g.o>
Cc: gentoo-dev@g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] torrent support in portage
Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2003 13:55:32
Message-Id: 1050414927.28228.14.camel@chinstrap.penguins.homeunix.net
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-dev] torrent support in portage by "Robin H.Johnson"
1 On Mon, 2003-04-14 at 21:38, Robin H.Johnson wrote:
2
3 > Two questions here:
4 > How much bandwidth is required for each bittorrent tracker? Nowhere I
5 > have I seen this information.
6
7 I'm not sure, but since it is only tracking who is up/downloading which
8 file, I wouldn't imagine it would be very much.
9
10 >
11 > Secondly for people to be able to offer the package to the BT network,
12 > that means they would have it on their hard drive, and be running an
13 > active program to provide it 24x7.
14
15 There must be at least 1 person with the full file at all times, this is
16 generally (but does not have to be), the tracker server.
17
18 > So far what I have seen of BT is that
19 > it takes one program instance per tracked file. In that case things are
20 > going to get very big, very fast.
21
22 Yes, it does. I'm not sure of the overhead of each instance, but I've
23 come across sites with literally hundreds of files available.
24
25
26 > Additionally I certianly will not be
27 > letting people eat the bandwidth that I pay for on my servers at work.
28
29 I'm not asking you to. Set your upload cap to 2K and your simultaneous
30 uploads to 1 for all I care. You only need upload for as long as you
31 are downloading. Or, don't use it at all.
32
33 > Some residential cable and DSL ISPs are also very anal about bandwidth
34 > usage so that could cause serious issues there (a friends ISP limits him
35 > to 1GiB/day).
36
37 Then he probably wouldn't want to use it. My ISP doesn't limit my
38 usage, so I would use it.
39
40 >
41 > Your idea would be wonderful if bandwidth were free, or at least
42 > significently cheaper than it is now for much of the world.
43
44 But, in some parts of the world, it is pretty cheap, for those of us
45 that HAVE cheap bandwidth, we could be using each others and let those
46 of you with pay-by-the-minute access, small pipes, or bandwidth usage
47 limits make better use of the mirrors. Everybody is happy :)
48
49 >
50 > > A bittorrent server (this is the infrastructure part), that maintains
51 > > torrents of the larger packages (I define larger as 20MB+), such as
52 > > XFree.
53 > Looking at the master distfiles directory, there are 343 files larger
54 > than 10MiB. Only 140 files larger than 20MiB. There are 9316 files in
55 > total, spanning 18Gb. The 343 files take up 9.4Gb of space. So they are
56 > definetely out of proportion. So having a lower limit would be better.
57
58 I chose 20MiB as an arbitrary number as "something that doesn't download
59 instantaneously on my cable modem", lowering it to 10MiB would still
60 work.
61
62
63 Cheers,
64
65 Caleb
66
67
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