first available close fedora mirror?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 03:59:03PM -0500, Jamon Camisso wrote:
> 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.

Sure, it saves blizzard money at the expense of their users.  Overall
they are wasting more bandwidth and tons more CPU, but blizzard doesn't
care since it isn't their resources being wasted.

> 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.

Torrents can't use the kernel's sendfile() syscall, because it needs
checksums calculated and stuck on packets.  an ftp and web server can
use sendfile.  This offloads the transmission of a file entirely to the
kernel where the file goes straight from disk to the network socket with
no copies to user space.  This is the only way to efficiently use high
speed links (like kernel.org has).

> 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.

And yet those "slow" mirrors are doing 99% of the fedora distribution.

> The distribution or the mirror maintainers?

Both.

Of course to really make a useful difference, try using a network
install method that doesn't involve downloading complete ISO's, of which
you won't even use the majority, and do in place upgrades using the
network too of just the packages you are actually using.  I hope fedora
has managed to figure that out by now.  Debian has been doing it for
over a decade.  Fedora's totally insane pile of ISOs are using almost
half the diskspace of mirrors.kernel.org.  Debian which covers more
architectures than anyone else and has more packages than anyone else,
uses about 10% of the disk space of fedora.  I still don't know how that
is possible.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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