So, I've been fiddling around with BitTorrent and all the variant clients. And... I like it. A lot. The shared downloading and easily resumable downloads make it a keen thing indeed.
It turns out that BitTornado, one of the variant clients, does apply a global rate cap if you're serving multiple files up. This is good as Bittorrent clients'll eat all the available bandwidth, and then some, if given the chance. Not a huge problem for client-only systems, or systems with big upstream pipes, but for me with a smallish (192K) upstream pipe, well... running multiple torrents wouldn't be an option without this. With it I can throw all the torrents being served into a single directory and know that the 14K rate cap is applied to all the uploads in aggregate. Woo, and, I might add, hoo!
I've already set up a few torrents for some of the big files on the server (Jane Irwin's Vogelein.com is hosted here, and the MP3s on her resources page are available via bittorrent) and I think I'm going to set some up for the prebuild VMS perl distributions. While there may not be a VMS bittorrent client, most everyone's got a windows, linux, or Mac box handy, and it'll mean less load compared to ftp or web downloads of the things. That's not a bad thing.
Pity the protocol's slightly too heavy-weight to work for small files--it'd be cool if this could be automatically integrated into browsers to distribute more stuff automatically.
Posted by Dan at April 27, 2004 03:33 PM | TrackBack (0)Bugzilla has a bug on it:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=236755
Posted by: Eric Hodel at April 28, 2004 10:48 AMI hope they do add in torrent support for inline things. I'd originally thought "Nah, startup time's too darned big" but after reading the bug, well, I thought "what if someone wanted to hang a strongbad/little ninja thing off a server with otherwise anemic bandwidth"?
Posted by: Dan at April 28, 2004 12:28 PMI wrote a comment on the other BT story about Azureus(.sf.net)...
Posted by: jb at May 5, 2004 02:48 PM