[CentOS] Don't forget to use torrents for your downloads!

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Thursday 02 April 2009 18:53, Karanbir Singh wrote:
> John R Pierce wrote:
> >> here is a bit more trivia for those interested: the 4 main 'seeds' that
> >> came up were each running with 100mbps open uplinks. Atleast one person
> >> in the early stages was running at 200 odd mbps.
> >
> > geez, makes me wonder if I should even bother to leave mine running with
> > a 50kbyte/sec uplink ca (thats about 500kbps)...
>
> If you can - you should. The costs of running those torrents at 100mbps
> is way too high to run over any sustained period of time ( and they are
> all offline now ). So once the first rush has spread out - the whole
> user experience is totally driven by the other users part of the deluge.
>
> Normally, I'd keep 1 machine running from within .centos.org to make
> sure there was always atleast 1 seed for each of the torrents. And that
> machine runs only at 10mbps, for all the torrents and is also a part of
> other services within centos.org

Aren't these speeds a relative notion, ie. dependent on where you are as a 
peer?

I mean, I have a 100Mbps link to my local LAN, which is connected via a 2Gbps 
optical cables to my national center, which in turn has several uplinks of 
various bandwidth (from 32Mbps to 10Gbps) connected to surrounding countries. 
From there on I don't know. So how can I be sure that for example someone on 
the other side of the planet can utilize my whole bandwidth?

Of course, we can initiate some peer-to-peer data transfer and measure the 
actual speed, but isn't the terminology "100Mbps to outside world" a little 
bit undefined in general? Because not all parts of "outside world" may always 
have greater bandwidth than my uplink?

Is there maybe some web site with a planet-wide topology of the internet, 
along with actual bandwidths of all the links, so one can estimate the 
transfer speed between two arbitrary points on the globe?

FWIW, tommorow I'll use torrent to download the dvd iso's for CentOS 5.3 
(32bit and 64bit archs), and I can leave them seeded 24/7 for an undefinite 
time in the future, cca 3 years at least, or maybe untill 5.4 appears. If 
anyone can pull 100Mbps from me, I'll be glad to help the community. It's 
only that I am not so sure that it is well defined to say "I have an 100Mbps 
uplink". Uplink to my nearest neighbor, yes, but further than that...

Best, :-)
Marko