On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 12:36 AM, Ray Morris support@bettercgi.com wrote:

Would it be good to be able to serve the same number of users while reducing resource consumption, including bandwidth, by 70%?

Let's get rid of some of the noise in the data and compare just DVD versus CD. Using the NetNITCO data let's look at only the most rcent release, 5.6, and for less noise let's look at the most popular CPU, i386:

65 /5.6/isos/i386/CentOS-5.6-i386-bin-DVD.iso 25 /5.6/isos/i386/CentOS-5.6-i386-bin-1of7.iso 20 /5.6/isos/i386/CentOS-5.6-i386-netinstall.iso 16 /5.6/isos/i386/CentOS-5.6-i386-bin-5of7.iso 13 /5.6/isos/i386/CentOS-5.6-i386-bin-4of7.iso 13 /5.6/isos/i386/CentOS-5.6-i386-bin-2of7.iso 12 /5.6/isos/i386/CentOS-5.6-i386-bin-3of7.iso 9 /5.6/isos/i386/CentOS-5.6-i386-bin-7of7.iso 9 /5.6/isos/i386/CentOS-5.6-i386-bin-6of7.iso 5 /5.6/isos/i386/CentOS-5.6-i386-LiveCD.iso

CD 1 is downloaded 38% percent as often as the DVD - a significant amount. So people seem to want CDs a good portion of the time. Also interesting is that CD 6 and 7 are downloaded about 1/3rd as much as CD 1. It looks like a lot of people are like me in that they do installations with only the first CD or two and don't need to download all 4 GB.

That's a 70% reduction in bandwidth, time, disk io on the mirrors when they get CD #1 & #2 instead of the full DVD. Every user who is served by downloading only 2 CDs totalling 1.2 GB instead of 4 GB is good for the mirrors, good for the network, and good for the users. If they are forced to download the DVD instead, that means they use three times the resources that they currently do.

I don't currently run a mirror because I don't have quite enough bandwidth available, but if I were running a mirror I'd rather serve up 1.2 GB to each of those users than 4 GB. -- Ray Morris support@bettercgi.com

Duh! Yeah! What he said! ;-)

I mean, I strongly agree with Ray Morris.

Regards

Maulvi

On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 9:36 AM, Ray Morris support@bettercgi.com wrote:

I don't currently run a mirror because I don't have quite enough bandwidth available, but if I were running a mirror I'd rather serve up 1.2 GB to each of those users than 4 GB. --

As a mirror operator, I'd rather reduce space by getting rid of the ISOs. Less disk space also would lead to less RAM needed on the mirror servers. Bandwidth isn't as big of deal to most me (and I imagine most mirror operators) but hardware to support the mirror is expensive, and any savings in disk used by a release is a positive in my book.

-Jeff