From: Morgan <taria@...>
Date: 2005-10-15T08:14:03+09:00
Subject: Re: A big thank you to Robby Russell...

[Delayed reaction due to me still catching up on reading ruby-talk after
no mail access for a while... Up to october 1 now...]

Han Holl wrote:

>On 9/28/05, Austin Ziegler <halostatue@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > Well, honestly, BitTorrent requires that there be continuous interest in
> > the files being torrented. Unless the files are well seeded and/or
> > downloaded often, BitTorrent downloads will often be much slower than
> > simple FTP downloads with round-robin mirrors as have been set up for
> > RubyForge.
> >
> > Oh, I didn't know that. I my naivety I thought that if 4 servers were all
>continuously offering these bittorent files, simple FTP download speed would
>be the lower boundary.
>Apparently there is more overhead in the bittorrent protocol than I thought.

The problem as I understand it is that bittorrent is really best for 
distributing
small numbers of large files. A single tracker can coordinate things for 
lots of
files, but as far as actual seeding goes (the act most analagous to a system
providing an ftp download), it's unusual for more than a few files to be seeded
at a time. (The original bt client, I believe, would only allow three 
instances to
be open at a time.) This works well enough for, say, having downloads of linux
cd images. (Which is how I got mine the last time I tried doing anything with
it.) Not so good for something like rubyforge, where you have a very large 
number
of small files - you could make a torrent of the entire thing maybe, which 
would
be useful to almost no one...

I've thought off and on about a system that could deal with this sort thing 
better.
Something with the file verification systems like bittorrent (both to 
protect against
ordinary data corruption and malicious file modifications), that allowed 
passively
seeding files - if someone wants it, it's available, but if not, resources 
aren't
wasted on it. Also less dependence on a single central server, since running a
high-usage bt tracker seems to be very hard on a system. Throw in some
public/private key to allow validation of <whatever file replaces .torrent> 
files
that were acquired through an untrusted source...

Mostly there's three things that have kept me from actually trying to make 
this.
1. I don't know enough about ruby (particularly thread handling) to make it 
work.
2. I don't know enough about designing network protocols to make it work.
3. I doubt my ability to convince enough other people to use it to make it 
worthwhile.

-Morgan, hates seeing "seeds: 0"... 


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