first available close fedora mirror?

[Jamon Camisso]

Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 03:13:49PM -0500, Jamon Camisso wrote:
>> Use their torrents, it's much easier on bandwidth for the project and is
>>  faster than an overloaded mirror e.g. on the i686 live cd torrent there
>> are 500 seeds and 800+ leeches, plenty fast enough.
> 
> Actually torrents is NOT easier on the bandwidth.

Depends who you ask and your users I guess. Think World of Warcraft with
9+ million users, if Blizzard things sending out patches via torrents is
worth building into their program, it must be worth something to them
e.g. 9 million x 2gb is a pretty large bandwidth bill at the end of the
month to have to absorb whereas farming that out to your paying
customers is a sheer stroke of technical genius.

> One of the admins of kernel.org proved that very well with stats from
> the last fedora release where he tried to help with the torrent, and did
> over 30% of the complete torrent seeding, and still served 10 times that
> by http/ftp from kernel.org alone.  The torrents accounted for
> practically nothing in total traffic, but required a dedicated server to
> manage the cpu overhead it required.

Some clients support distributed tracking requiring less centralized
resources to manage. Moreover, if more people used torrents, there would
be less bandwidth used on http/ftp mirrors -- it's a chicken egg thing.

> If you have a mirror network (which fedora does) then torrents are an
> awful thing to have.  If you don't have a mirror network, then torrents
> are quite a helpful system.

Fedora have mirrors, and the Canadian ones that I've been watching today
all return at capacity messages. Might just be a matter of getting the
iso at the right time, but in the 20 minutes it took to dl the iso via
rtorrent, i would have wasted all that time poking around for a working
slow mirror.

> So do the distribution a favour and DON'T use the torrents.

The distribution or the mirror maintainers?

Jamon

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