Re: Debian Distribution getting too big?
On Fri, Oct 13, 2000 at 10:11:44PM +0200, Andreas Schuldei wrote:
>
> But the people who provide for the mirrors might find it suddenly really
> expensiv to let people download all this stuff or store it on their local
> systems in the first place. Could some of the people who provide both the
> bandwidth and the storage shed some light on the costs? I do not know hard
> facts here.
>
The ANU sunsite mirror for instance is no longer pulling downloads - no
space and bandwidth even between universities in AU isn't cheap. Debian was
using half the disk allocated to all Linux software before they started
cutting back. We all pull from the full mirror at mirror.aarnet
(Queensland, well connected) via a squid hierarchy now, or from Perth (feels
like an overutilized E1 at their end) when mirror.aarnet is toast (as it has
been since the RH7.0 meltdown).
> A differently organized mirroring strategy comes to mind, where thepackagaes
> most often downloaded get distributed further down the hiracy of mirrors and
> the seldomly used stuff stays on a few servers. The numbers are there. What
> about it?
As long as people are conscientious about using web proxies Debian
doesn't really need a large number of mirrors. But since people aren't
conscientious.. ftp-master could stop public distribution and only push to
top level mirrors. Top level mirrors could be configured to block direct
accesses by non-web proxy clients, forcing the lazy to use proxies. Web
proxy hierarchies already have the features you want, we just need users to
use them more fully to reduce the load on the top level mirrors. Since .debs
never change without changing filenames they can be cached forever.
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