Fedora Torrent seeder plans and future

[Kevin Fenzi]

Greetings. 

As some of you may know, we are migrating all of Fedora Infrastructure
over to RHEL6 from the old existing RHEL5 servers. This allows us to
offer newer/better services and have faster/better upstream support for
our services. As part of this migration we have come to our torrent
server ( torrent.fedoraproject.org ). 

We have been able to migrate it to a new RHEL6 instance, but looking at
a number of factors, we wonder if this might be a good time to retire
this service. 

Problems/Issues/Background:

1. On the release engineering side, the process of creating and signing
the torrent checksums, then syncing them to the torrent seed is
difficult and time consuming. (The torrent seed server can't be in the
same location as all our other rel-eng resources due to open external
port requirements). 

2. Torrent usage has been decreasing over time. 

   a. median active users per day over the last 800 days has shown
      a decrease from 528 at the start of the time period to 220 at the
      end.
   b. total seeds have remained relatively constant
       we explain this in that the many clients are consistently seeds
       for every release - roughly
   c. the total completed downloads are decreasing.

You can see stats for the rhel6/opentracker instance at: 
http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/stats/

3. There is not much in the way of open source torrent seed software.
We have cobbled together a working setup on RHEL6, but it's not
trivial. Maintenance and updating this setup will continue to be
difficult over time. 

There's a number possible reasons for the decline in usage: 

- many providers throttle or block torrent downloads. 
- Our download infrastructure and mirrors system has gotten good enough
  that direct downloads are usually faster and easier. 
- many sites that made torrents popular are also discontinuing them in
  favor of other things like magnet links. (see thepiratebay.org). 
- More of our users are downloading RC's or the like directly instead
  of waiting for release, meaning they don't seed or download the
  torrents. 

Solutions/Suggestions: 

1. Discontinue torrent seeding before F17 alpha. 

2. Discontinue torrent seeding, but generate "official" torrent files
for download so others in the community could seed if they wished to. 

3. Continue providing a torrent seeder, but set some kind of threshold
for when we might want to discontinue it down the road.

4. Publish a magnet link and point to sites like openbittorrent.com as
a tracker (with direct download also listed). 

Thoughts? Questions? 

kevin
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