Re: Apt-Torrent project
Arnaud Kyheng wrote:
I don't agree with the little package problem with Bittorrent. With
Bittornado I'm using as a backend, the super-seeder option answer to
this problem since if the package is already well available on the
network, it'll not answer to the client but let it download from peers.
[...]
And also, if you think that the tracker overhead not worth a 5k package,
you could as well split the downloading system in two. I mean put only
>= 5k packages files on the apt-torrent server and let the others be
fetched directly in http.
This would probably help as long as you didn't abuse super-seeding. One
solution may be to only super seed those packages which are smaller than
some threshold and are also in base or have a priority > standard(or
something). Like most things, the distribution of popular packages
appears to have a zipf distribution(at least, according to popcon), so
you could also gain efficiency by exploiting this data.
This can be done easily since apt-torrent is fetching the Packages.gz as
usual. I mean I could add a special header in the Packages.gz
description to tell the proxy where to download the package direct-http,
or apt-torrent-server for example.
Well, I wouldn't edit the Packages.gz file directly since it will no
longer match the hash in the Release file, I would have this in a
separate file, if at all.
My original idea was to save bandwidth of the Debian server, and improve
the downloading speed of the packages for users that are even far of a
mirror. I found that the Bittorrent was really mature and will fit well.
In the future, I could as well use GNUnet as a backend :)
Although I personally get fantastic download speeds from the push
primary mirrors, I guess this is not the case everywhere. I agree that
moving some load off of the mirror network would be beneficial.
I look forward to trying apt-torrent and hope that it works out well.
Since it appears that you are not a debian developer, are you looking
for someone to package/sponsor this?
-Mike
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