[Live-demo] Downloading via BitTorrent?

[Alex Mandel]

On 07/05/2012 03:49 PM, Angelos Tzotsos wrote:
> On 07/06/2012 01:19 AM, Cameron Shorter wrote:
>> On 6/07/2012 7:56 AM, Hamish wrote:
>>> John wrote:
>>>> ibiblio (part of the University. of NC, Chapel Hill) is home
>>>> to a lot of Linux distributions and various open source software
>>>> packages.
>>>> We've recently increased our capacity for hosting and
>>>> distributing large files by using BitTorrent.  Would the
>>>> osgeo-live community be interested in adding BT as a download
>>>> method for the osgeo-live images?  If you're familiar with BT,
>>>> our system has a seeding server that is as reliable as a web
>>>> server.  I uploaded the current and past couple of releases.
>>>>
>>>> http://terasaur.org/item/show/osgeo-live-5-5/6519
>>>> http://terasaur.org/search?query=osgeo
>>>>
>>>> Comments and questions are welcome.  By the way, completed
>>>> downloads counts are available.  Click the "Downloads" link
>>>> just above the list towards the bottom of the details page.
>>> Hi John,
>>>
>>> probably Alex is the one to talk to, see our previous (short)
>>> conversation after your last approach,
>>>    http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gis.osgeo.livedemo/2871
>>>
>>>
>>> and some other torrent idea threads,
>>>    http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gis.osgeo.livedemo/432
>>>    http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gis.osgeo.livedemo/981
>>>    http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gis.osgeo.livedemo/3338
>>>
>>
>> Thank you John for the kind offer. I'm tentatively in favour of making
>> use of it, but would like to hear thoughts from Alex and Angelos first.
>> One think I've noticed is what seems to be the extra large size of
>> images currently listed at:
>> http://terasaur.org/search?query=osgeo
>> In the order of 10 GB, compared to the 4.3 GB listed on our website:
>> http://live.osgeo.org/en/download.html
>>
>>
> Hi all,
> This is another good step making the live dvd available for more people,
> after having some download mirrors around the globe + a recently created
> SourceForge project to host our iso files
> (http://sourceforge.net/projects/osgeo-live/?source=directory).
> Since Alex is very interested about the download statistics for his
> research, I want to hear from him too :) Perhaps he is not only
> interested in download counts...
> 
> Regards,
> Angelos
> 
> 


My plan this release was to move 100% to Sourceforge. If I recall
correctly ibiblio is a sourceforge mirror and would already be hosting
the regular downloads.

In the past we did experiment with torrent. My analysis is that we don't
have a sufficient number of high-bandwidth seeders to make torrents as
fast/faster than direct download. So for this upcoming release I'd like
to see if just having the 20+ sourceforge mirrors suffices for the needs
of the downloaders.

Is ibiblio running the tracker on those torrents? if not which tracker
are you using? Download statistics are quite tricky with torrents since
not all clients connect to all seeds. Also do you have a capacity cap on
your torrents? I looked at doing something like that on my mirrors and
the osgeo mirrors as a way to ensure other applications on those
networks don't get saturated with just torrents.

Thanks,
Alex