Hi, On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 09:25:17AM +0100, Clayton wrote:
This is an extension of a tread I started over on the openSUSE user list.
When 11.0 was released, the openSUSE servers staggered a bit under the load of so many people hammering away trying to either grab the torrent files or download via ftp.
Uhm, I'm not exactly sure which servers you refer to. While the openSUSE website and wiki was going down for a few hours, software.opensuse.org (the download choosing page) was available. And especially download.opensuse.org was in a cool, smooth state _all_ the time. It has never been under something that you remotely could call load. (Try it out on Thursday!) What you might have been seeing is that some mirrors where suffering from load. They are the ones that need to do the real work. Although you won't see this happen during the first 24 hours after release either, because we send most requests to a commercial Content Delivery Network during that time, which has > 30.000 servers worldwide, and chances are very high that one of their machines is located _right_ in your ISPs building. (My local ISP in Cologne also has a box of them.) If you get redirected to a different mirror, you can see such problems. This is something that doesn't affect the openSUSE servers though, and can't be fixed by us, we can only try to make good choices in mirrors and use mirrors that are stable & fast. To know about mirror quality, we largely depend on your feedback. If you see problems with mirrors please note the address you see in the browser (or other download program) and report issues to admin at opensuse org, or via Bugzilla, product openSUSE.org, component download infrastructure. Now, problems you might have seen during the _first_ week of the 11.0 release could also be attributed to a bug we had in mirror monitoring. Our mirror monitoring had a bug that I fixed very shortly before release, but I accidentally reverted my fix by updating the same component on the mirror database server. This is regrettable and several days passed until I noticed it. The result was that we sent users not only to alive mirrors, but also to some that were dead or too slow. So I think that you might have been affected by that. Which would mean that it should work much better this time. But still, please do report problems. If you report problems, you will help many many users :-)
The result was that a large number of us (myself included) waited several days before we were even able to get near the website so that we could download the torrent files and get started with downloading/seeding.
So, my proposal is.... pre-release the Torrent files.
Pre-release ONLY the Torrent files so that those of us who will be Torrenting openSUSE 11.1 can set up our Torrent clients and be ready to go when 11.1 is released and the Torrent tracker is switched "on".
The advantage is that we will not need to join the queue waiting for the website to respond, and we will be able to start helping with distributing this release immediately.
Thoughts? Comments? Is this possible? Reasonable?
Hm, is the background of your idea that you want to spread the torrent files earlier, simply to work around expected unavailability of them? Or what's the rationale? Well, shouldn't be needed at all. In addition, you can easily avoid all problems, if you use a metalink client to download. Just use a metalink client and download.opensuse.org, and I *guarantuee* you a download which is working, arrives correctly, and that with reasonably fast speed. You can even combine HTTP and Torrent download with a client that supports that simultaneously. I have blogged about this a minute ago, so there's something to link to and to spread the information. Read here: http://lizards.opensuse.org/2008/12/16/best-way-to-download-opensuse/ And please pass it on! Note that you can download .torrent files in the described way at any time, safely, quickly. Should you need it. But a torrent-capable Metalink client will even *use* the Torrent and download the whole thing you are after. And even more, you don't need to download the torrent file at all. Thanks, 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