Captain's Log

Bittorrent and some updates

(Edit: For a more recent post on this topic go here.)

Bittorrent is a file distribution protocol that works well at distributing a single set of files to a large number of people while only using a small amount of upstream of the original server. It does this by using the upstream of all the downloaders to send pieces to other downloaders. Since the data isn't sent sequentially, you effectively add to the servers bandwidth with every downloader who joins. (supply scales with demand) You can read more about it how it works and download it at the above link. An upstream bandwidth limiting client is available here.

Recently Bittorrent was used to distribute Red Hat 9.0 isos since Red Hat's servers were slowed to a crawl with downloaders. The huge experiment was a real success, and the system has averaged a 4 MB/s upstream over the past 15 days. That's a total of 31.52 TiB (tebibytes). Here are some stats on the first three days of distribution.

I don't care about red hats, you say? You can also find movies, games, music, concerts, programs, and a ton of tv shows over bittorrent. All of these things to download fit the description of 'lots of downloaders, not a lot of servers.' Some places to look for torrent files are:

For links to other sites:
http://smiler.no-ip.org/BT/BTlinks.php
http://www.torrentzone.tk/
For torrent downloads:
http://torrent.milfclan.com/ for TV shows (http://torrents.noneleft.bm/ is down)
http://www.torrentse.cx/ (for everything)

Also on Buddyzoo: It's growing insanely fast. There are almost 810000 people signed up at the time of this post. Go Join
Also on Audioscrobbler: There are some problems with the submission server that's causing it to miss some songs. This will be fixed soon, says RJ.