On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 09:04:14PM +0200, Carlos E. R. wrote:
The Monday 2008-07-21 at 17:09 +0200, Peter Poeml wrote:
"what about bittorent for everything?" [...] The answer is: No.
Bittorrent is not suitable for everything, because
1) P2P is only suitable for large files; but many files are tiny. Its overhead and complexity makes it unattractive for small files. P2P's success is largely based on its ability to escape legal control.
I read a study of some European university that contradicted this. They experimentally used bittorrent in the intranet to deploy software updates to the entire intranet (thousands of computer updating (windows?) at the same time, and they discovered that it was way faster than having some dedicated update servers in the same intranet. They found a legal use for it that was better that the normally used solution.
Not a contradiction - in such in-vitro circumstances this is conceivable, without traffic shaping as done by ISPs. Btw normally in such a network you need (and have) a proxy cache hiearchy anyway. A P2P network can deal well with such a sudden burst of content, that is to be replicated in identical form onto many clients. But with openSUSE we are looking at a completely different worload, we are not talking about 100 files but about a million, with high fluctuation and hard to predict.
For the purpose they used a version of bittorrent client that could not look up in Internet, only intranet.
I don't have the reference handy, but some one may recollect this study.
- -- Cheers, Carlos E. R.
Peter -- Contact: admin@opensuse.org (a.k.a. ftpadmin@suse.com) #opensuse-mirrors on freenode.net Info: http://en.opensuse.org/Mirror_Infrastructure SUSE LINUX Products GmbH Research & Development